Daily Archives: April 23, 2021

For the past year, graduate students have met with University administrators to demand Northwestern prioritize students with marginalized identities. The administration has largely responded with hesitancy, according to some students.

Sarah Peko-Spicer, an organizer of CoalitionNU and Ph.D. candidate, said the collective has demanded inclusive healthcare, increased funding for affinity spaces and other support systems after a year of pandemic mobilization and appeals to the University.

I personally am rethinking if this is an effective pathway to be working down, she said. Are we just wasting everyones time sitting in these meetings?

Still, Peko-Spicer said she hopes a projected return to campus may rejuvenate organizers after a difficult year where the graduate students academic and life responsibilities were exacerbated, particularly for caregiving students and those of marginalized identities.

In Fall 2019, members of The Graduate School affinity groups began meeting to consider collective action after sharing frustrations with leadership, forming CoalitionNU. One of their efforts resulted in an anonymous March letter to administrators, calling for the removal of Teresa Woodruff, former TGS dean. They also urged University leadership to prioritize the wellbeing of students of marginalized identities through funding, space provision, childcare and more.

TGS is responsible for cultivating an accessible and equitable environment that values diverse backgrounds, the letter stated. Under Dean Woodruffs leadership, TGS has fallen short of these goals and, in so doing, has harmed the underrepresented communities they have pledged to support.

Since then, at least one demand has been realized Woodruff left Northwestern at the end of the 2019-20 academic year. The group has since held regular meetings with Interim Graduate School Dean Kelly Mayo, Peko-Spicer said.

CoalitionNUs demands have largely stayed the same since the pandemic began, Peko-Spicer said.

Peko-Spicer emphasized that the coalition prioritizes advocating for University support of Indigenous graduate students, like by designating an outdoor space in the Chicago Campus for land-based spiritual practices.

In addition, the University has failed to prioritize mental health of graduate students, Peko-Spicer said. Along with advocating for inclusive insurance coverage, CoalitionNU is still pushing for the hiring of more mental health counselors for the Graduate School community and expanding the list of referrals to therapists. The group has also been trying to internally prioritize the well-being of its members in the last year.

Ph.D. candidate Erique Zhang said the coalitions demands shifted to include police abolition and supporting NU Community Not Cops and undergraduate activist organizations. Many of the coalitions members helped draft a June 2020 petition calling for the abolition of University and Evanston police and for investment in life-giving practices for Black students, they said.

I do actually think a lot of the organizing has shifted to focus on abolition, Zhang said. I think thats good at this point, thats where our priorities are lying.

Ph.D. candidate Andrew Hull, unity committee chair and former co-chair of Northwestern University Graduate Workers, said the group often collaborates with the coalition.

Many NUGW and CoalitionNU members overlap. Both are united in their goals, Hull said, and NUGW has incorporated the collectives demands into its own letters to the University.

(Coalition work) puts fantastic pressure on the administration itself, Hull said. I think just as importantly, it reveals to other graduate workers just how much power we have when we work together.

Their collaboration also shows that graduate students are not alone in their struggles, Hull added.

CoalitionNUs organizers have a lot of responsibilities beyond the collective that contribute to these struggles, Peko-Spicer said. The groups organizers are currently writing dissertations, looking for jobs and completing other graduate tasks.

Still, Peko-Spicer said she is able to see that CoalitionNU is really a collaborative effort. Through organizing in the past year, she saw other activist groups on campus share visions of what the University could become. This convergence, she said, showed her the power of collective organizing.

One of our organizations on its own is something that the University can fight and stop, Peko-Spicer said. But when we continue to build out and build up together, I think thats going to be an unstoppable force.

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Related Stories:

A year into pandemic, NUGW is still advocating for sixth-year funding

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Graduate students demand removal of TGS dean Teresa Woodruff in letter

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CoalitionNU members emphasize collective action and existing demands - Daily Northwestern

A charity devoted to the author Jane Austen has dismissed reports of an interrogation of her alleged links to the slave trade as a misrepresentation.

Reports in several newspapers this week alleged that Jane Austens House in Hampshire would re-evaluate her colonial roots, due to her father's plantation, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

But in response, the charity said: The plans for refreshing the displays and decoration of Jane Austens House have been misrepresented. It said it had been planning to update its displays for several years.

Jane Austen lived during the era of slavery and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807.

According to academics, Austens father George became a trustee of a 294-acre plantation with slaves in Antigua in 1760.

But this information was already widely accessible in the public domain, the charity said.

In a statement on its website, the charity said it was increasingly asked questions by visitors on this issue and it was therefore appropriate that it shared the information and existing research on her connections to slavery and its mention in her novels.

We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea.

We have been planning to refresh our displays and decoration at Jane Austens House for several years.

The overarching aim of this long-term process is to bring Jane Austens brilliance and the extraordinary flourishing of creativity she experienced at the house to the heart of every visit, said the charity.

The charity said the refreshed displays would be nuanced, based on peer-reviewed research and in the authors own words.

Jane Austens House is the latest charity to come under fire for their work in what the think tank the Runnymede Trust described earlier this week as a worrying trend.

The trust was forced to defend its own work from a group of Conservative MPs after it criticised the recent controversial Sewell Report.

The race equality charity accused the MPs of weaponising the charity regulator in a politically motivated attack.

The recent spate of criticism prompted a group of more than 60 charity leaders to put out a statement backing charities right to campaign after another group of Conservative MPs called for the government to stop the worthless work of organisations promulgating weird, woke ideas.

The National Trust has been under fire since last year after it published a report researching its properties links to slavery, despite the Charity Commission receiving just three complaints about the charitys work or purpose.

In addition, childrens charity Barnardo's had to defend itself from a group of Conservative MPs in December who dismissed the charitys attempt to talk about white privilege as ideological dogma used by certain multinational corporates as a means to divide and conquer.

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Jane Austen charity dismisses claims it will re-evaluate the author's colonial roots - Third Sector

Dear Members of the Yale Community,

George Floyds murder was an indictment of our nations failure to address anti-Black violence and racism, but todays verdict was a positive step forward for our country. I am relieved that a jury of Derek Chauvins peers found him guilty of George Floyds murder, but I am no less heartbroken over the number of Black lives that have been cut short due to police violence. We must continue to focus our energy on addressing racism, injustice, and abuse of power by the police and others in positions of public trust and authority.

As an institution with a mission to improve the world, this university has a responsibility to find solutions to this crisis. At Yale, we are taking actions across multiple fronts. Faculty from many parts of the university are conducting research and shaping new teaching in fields that address racism and policing. Hubs of innovative scholarship and education in this area include the Department of African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yale Law Schools Justice Collaboratory, and the Center for Policing Equity. Their scholarly activities bring understanding to the current crisis and inform national policies and discussions.

We are reassessing and reshaping major aspects of policing on campus based on the 21CP Solutions report, An Assessment of the Yale Police Department, and on the input of students, faculty, staff, and New Haven community members. A key strategic priority is to assign the right resources to public safety needs. In situations that do not require a police response, we will expand the use of unarmed security personnel and enhance coordination with student life and Yale Health resources.

Antiracism is also at the heart of the universitys Belonging at Yale initiative. In October, for the second phase of this initiative, I launched new programs that delve into our history and support members of the university community. Our project on Yales historic entanglements and associations with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition, led by Professor David Blight and the Gilder Lehrman Center, is making progress, with a committed team of scholars and student researchers gathering valuable information from our archives and other sources. Moreover, each school and administrative division at Yale is developing a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging plan that proposes actions to address the needs of historically underrepresented staff, faculty, students, and alumni. Planning together will allow us to align work across the institution and to track progress.

In addition to our studies, research, scholarship, practice, and university operations, people across Yale are galvanizing community-led efforts to shed light on difficult truths, build solidarity, and heal the rifts in our society. Many of Yales campus organizations have created forums for critical dialogue, connection, and learning, including cultural centers, affinity groups, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Yale Alumni Association. We also are working with partners in our home city and with alumni communities across the country and around the world to share our time and resources with the people who need both during this difficult period.

Over the coming days, we will hold forums for discussion, learning, and healing. Yale also is providing resources for those in our community who need support. Information is available at the Belonging at Yale website and will be updated regularly as students, faculty, and staff continue to organize community gatherings.

Todays verdict ensures that a former police officer has been brought to justice, but we have far to go in achieving liberty and justice for all in our nation. We must continue to take action to improve society, so that all of us can live securely and safely. I approach our ongoing work with hope because of the powerful reckoning that has taken place on individual and global scales over the past year. We will build on this energy and remember Mr. Floyd and other victims of racist violence.

Sincerely,

Peter SaloveyPresidentChris Argyris Professor of Psychology

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Today's verdict on the murder of George Floyd - Yale News

Harsha Walia. (Courtesy of Haymarket Books)

The border is not a place. Whether we are talking about the US-Mexico border, the Dominican RepublicHaitian border, the Line of Control dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, or the scores of other militarized, fortified, patrolled, or even electrified borders throughout the world, these demarcations function neither as simple geographic markers nor as geopolitical organizing tools. They dont even really function as barriers, as walls are easily breached, climbed over, dug under, orthrough visa overstays or by levying an asylum claimavoided altogether. The border, as author Harsha Walia puts it in her new book, Border and Rule, is less about a politics of movement per se and is better understood as a key method of imperial state formation, hierarchical social ordering, labor control, and xenophobic nationalism.

Sites of so much violence, contention, media frenzy, and fanaticism, the walls and all the dog-whistling rhetoric do not, in the end, protect or preserve. What borders do, Walia suggests, is theatrically deflect attention from whatever rot, hatred, or suffering is happening between the walls themselves, obscuring the source of a political shake-up. Walls, and immigration enforcement more generally, also make it easier for politicians to scapegoat migrants for all of the wants and woes of the native populace. And as barrierswhether physical or legalthey serve to mark limits to both empathy and solidarity.

Border and Rule is a wide-ranging analysis of the origins of borders and how US foreign policy violently uproots millions across the globe; it also touches on the destabilizing ills of capitalism, the hyper-exploitation of temporary workers (state-sanctioned programs of indentured work), and the rise of the anti-immigrant far right. It is a damning indictment not only of borders but also of the current global order.

A longtime activist with the No One Is Illegal, a grassroots migrant justice group based in Canada, Walia has been a vocal and mobilizing force in pro-migrant, abolitionist circles for well over a decade.

If only facts could change the worldas a friend sighingly put it to me in discussing Walias bookBorder and Rule could undo a lot of current suffering. And while the worlds many walls may not be pulled down soon, Walias project clearly aims to do exactly that. We spoke by phone in early March, discussing borders and what she imagines for a post-border world. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

John Washington

John Washington: How did you come to this work, and what has kept you putting so much time and intensive thought into it over the years?

Harsha Walia: I come from a family that has dealt with the legacy of one of the bloodiest human displacements in history, which is the partition [between India and Pakistan in 1947]. My grandfather fought in the independence struggle against the British Raj. He would talk about that, but his stories would stop at a particular time period, around the partition. There was deep silence, deep trauma. I returned to those experiences after being politicized. Its only in hindsight when you start to make sense of the world around you that those individual experiences make sense in a continuum of violence. And you shed the shame and the guilt around that.

Experiencing and observing the heightened machinery of detention and deportation, and how there was a synergy between the war at home and the war abroad, and that that was underwritten by racial capitalism and empire We cant think about immigration as a solely domestic issue.

Ive stayed involved because there really is no turning back for any of us who are involved in different movements. You just continue to learn. The people that I meet continue to inspire me. A lot of my thinking and theorizing derives from the principle no one is illegal. Refusing the distinction between good and bad immigrants really came from being in relationships with people who were criminalized and who were in the so-called category of bad immigrants.

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JW: How has your understanding of this field changed?

HW: My previous book, 2013s Undoing Border Imperialism, was a study of organizing, thinking through strategies and tactics and coalitional work and some of the messiness of social movement organizing. What has evolved and expanded for me is the need to look at border regimes with the specificity of their local context, while looking at their similarities across transnational regimes. Being in Canada, theres a lot of focus on the US as the kind of site and originator of many forms of state violence. In Canada, whenever regressive immigration policy is passed, the immediate response to condemning it is, This is an American-style policy. What that erases is Canadas own role in perfecting many forms of state violence, but also it provincializes North America without looking at border regimes around the world.

I really wanted to expand and build on an internationalist and transnational view to how border enforcement works, and to actually look at sites other than the United States as perfecting models of violence. I think its important to look at the ways the US borrows and builds on templates of violence that are imported.

We often think of migrant justice issues as separate from or at best parallel to Black and Indigenous struggles for decolonization and abolition. What I wanted to do is look at the historic formation of the border as completely bound up in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and expansionist imperialism. Thats necessary because I think it can be instructive and inform our current moment in how we think about solidarity, how we think of struggles not just as parallel and interconnected but as constituted through each other.

JW: I understand the critique you present in the book of trying to veer away from something like a utilitarian argument on behalf of migrantsthat they add to the economy or dont deplete the welfare stateor absolving migrants of implications that they are cheats or criminals, and that doing so succumbs to the logic of bordering. But dont we have to do some of that practical work of setting the record straight, disabusing people of erroneous and racist ideas, even as we also try to break through the system itself?

HW: I dont think they are necessarily always contradictory. Particularly as an organizer, theres always the balance of holding the deeper systemic critique while tending to the specifics of someones story. Inasmuch as I think its important to reject the politics of innocence, Ive worked with and supported a lot of people who say, Im innocent. I havent committed a crime. Migrating is not a crime. I think its absolutely possible to hold those pieces together. The necessity of pushing back against those logics is that if we only maintain the narrative of innocence or we succumb to the commodification of immigrants by equating them with the economy, then we have to be attentive to how that can bolster the system.

I think its important to highlight the ways migrants contribute to the economy and then very clearly and vociferously refuse the commodification of migrants, because that has been the history of migration, to use migrants as labor. If we look at the history of indentureship, with our current-day bracero program, this is increasingly the template of what migrants are supposed to become: disposable commodities. But that doesnt mean that we dont stand up and support the idea that immigrant rights are workers rights, or dont support immigrant workers in class struggle. Tactically, we can deconstruct myths without upholding them.

JW: You write, Scenes of border death maintain structures of racial violence and, as statistics of deaths pile up, we evade an interrogation of the source of this violence shaped through imperial, racialized, and spatialized control. How do we understand the human consequences, especially for those people not on the ground and only reading about borders from afar?

HW: When youre fighting alongside someone or supporting someone who is facing deportation, its very much about conveying someones story and fighting back against the dehumanization. To be able to talk about them in the fullness of who they are, the fact that their voice and their story needs to be told on their own terms. I think that is absolutely the case. And the reason that Border and Rule is structural is because Ive spent so long trying to fight and being involved in migrant justice struggles where so much of my day-to-day is about individual stories. And not to flatten them, because theyre all fighting detention or deportation, because everyone has their own story and their own journey and that deserves to be told.

But were also inundated in the individual stories at the expense of the structural. For me, thats why I chose to emphasize the structural. I think it is a gap, especially in thinking about the border. Whereas if we are rigorously thinking about other things, like war or imperialism, its possible to do reporting on war zones in a way that humanizes people and also talks about the war as a structural phenomenon, implicating power. But we dont see that as much around migrant justice reporting.

With border deaths especially so, because those deaths are made to be so passive, which is why I call them border killings. I think there needs to be a much stronger pushback to telling the stories of those who have been killed because of border controls, more strongly implicating the state as well.

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JW: Why do you think you dont see as much of a structural critique with border and immigration reporting?

HW: The story of migration and the ways in which mainstream migrant rights organizing has worked have been so focused on the story of humanizing people because there is such a deference to border regimes. People need to prove why they have the right to be here.

JW: You write about how border enforcement is one system in the larger regime of racial capitalism. Do you think that there is something unique in border and immigration issues that can be used to critique the system? If you look at far-right movements across the globe, for example, the thing they have most in common is an anti-immigrant agenda. Is there something we can harness in border and immigration discussions to go after the larger system?

HW: The border is increasingly becoming one of the most critical sites of struggle. By that I mean, its so important to understand whats happening at the border to migrants and refugees and in terms of immigration enforcement, but its something that is so much larger. Increasingly, a number of struggles are, at their core, going to engage with their relationship to the border. I dont think we can fight capitalism or have a global anti-imperialist struggle without looking at how central labor migration is to the continued exploitation and extraction of capital.

And when it comes to temporary labor migration in particular, I think this is so crucial, because so many on the left think that the ways in which we will fight back against the globalizing effect of capital is to have a nationalist responsethat is, well, [if] capital moves freely across borders and people dont, well, then we need to shut the border to capital. But this ignores how increasingly borders are the spatial fix to capitalism. Capitalism requires segmented labor, and bordering regimes multiply the segmentation.

Similarly, its impossible to fight back against the rise of the right, its impossible to fight back against the current era of capitalism, its impossible to fight back against the current era of imperialism without seeing how migration is such a central pillar to all three of them in our era. The border is central to all of those systems.

JW: Whats your vision for the border? Lets take the US-Mexico border as an example. I assume you would bulldoze the actual border wall, but then what? Would there be any checks, or absolute freedom of movement?

HW: I advocate for no borders. But what I think is important and instructive here, and Ill riff off of Ruth Wilson-Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, who say, When were talking about no prisons, were not only talking about getting rid of the physical infrastructure of the prison; its about altering the fundamental conditions that give rise to prisons. For me that is fundamentally what a no-borders politics is. Its not only getting rid of the border and then maintaining all of the social and state violences that gives rise to forced displacement. For me, a no-borders politics has two key corollaries, which is the freedom to stay and the freedom to move. Which means that people shouldnt be forcibly displaced, and people should be free to move.

That means that if there is no border between the United States and Mexico, the social conditions that give rise to the differentiation between what is the United States and Mexico would also evaporate. One of the greatest panics about getting rid of the border is that everyone would rush to come here, but that is assuming the condition of global apartheid, which is that one part of the world gets to reap and create wealth that has been built on exploitationlike imperialism, enslavement, and settler colonialismwhile the rest of the world is supposed to remain in abject poverty and subjugation. And so the panic if there is no border assumes that those conditions will remain. Whereas, when Im thinking of a no-border politics, it necessarily is part of a larger project and vision of eradicating those relations of dominance. Its about eradicating the social organization of difference, about eradicating capitalism such that the division between the so-called North and South effectively collapses.

JW: Underpinning those conditions is the nation-state, which is built on this racial capitalist system, so it seems like a quick series of dominos that would fall. So you undo the borders and logically you undo the modern nation state?

HW: Absolutely. And were undoing capitalism. If we dont have borders to maintain the global segmentation of labor, what would it mean to live in a world where the wage floor is the same around the world? And I dont mean everyone is paid the same, but the wage floor, where if you are producing something in the so-called Global South its not seen as a cheapened labor force.

JW: Who do you feel you need to convince with this book?

HW: I am hoping that what this book can be in service to is an internationalist view and a commitment to internationalism. I have been concerned with the lack of care for internationalist politics. And even issues like the Green New Deal, even those kinds of efforts that really domesticate justice. I am committed to doing work in service to a transnational and internationalist view, and just seeing how fundamentally connected the border is to issues of racial capital, to issues of empire, to other anti-racist struggles. Its not just about cause and effect, but really deeply interconnected and constitutive of each other. I dont think we can have an anti-war movement that isnt connected with migration. I dont think we can have an anti-capitalist movement that doesnt tend with migration. Im hoping the book can break some of that siloing effect.

JW: What practical steps can people take?

HW: You dont have to be organizing day in, day out to dismantle the border, to see how border issues are connected to whatever issue it is youre working on, and that to me, returning to why I hope this book is useful, is that folks see migration and displacement as central to all social struggles and all movements, and think about incorporating it in a meaningful way with an understanding of how it works, to all different struggles.

If youre fighting free trade agreements, migration is a key part of that fight. If youre fighting against drone warfare and imperialism, migrants are the human face and the human consequences of our foreign policies. If youre an abolitionist, its completely congruent to demand an end to cops and prisons and borders at the same time.

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Pulling Down the Worlds Walls: A Conversation With Harsha Walia - The Nation

Read this book. You will be stirred, and maybe you will feel a bit uncomfortable. That is a good thing.

Reuben Jonathan Millers work of narrative nonfiction, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, mixes personal memoir with science, sociological data and anthropology as it describes the brutal effects of the carceral state in the United Statesparticularly on Black people.

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Criminal justice reform is on the lips of almost anyone running for political office these days, regardless of party affiliation. But on the streets of Chicago or Detroit or Ann Arbor, Mich., where Miller walked for years to gather his data and stories, one would be hard-pressed to find it in action. There is a massive lack of connection between the platitudes like We must do better and the Black children and adults who have had their entire lives transformed by a war on crime now several decades old.

Using firsthand interviews with about a dozen men and women after their incarceration and release, Miller cuts through the noise about criminal justice reform to lay bare what life is really like on the other side of a prison sentence. Informed by his experience as a Black man who grew up poor in a segregated Chicago, as well as the lives of his own family members touched by the carceral state, Miller is able to coax the hopes and dreams, fears and terrors out of his interview subjects. The result is a searingly honest view of life after incarceration.

Do you have a roof over your head while you are reading this review? Are you housed in a place that feels safe? The majority of men and women leaving prison each year do not share those settings or that safety. Some of Millers subjects, including his older brother, Jeremiah, walk us through their journey of looking for housing. Miller lets them guide us through his ethnography of the community while expertly weaving in social science, empirical data and reflections on public policy to reveal the traps laid for them.

In Chicago, for example, there are more than 50 policies that bar people with criminal records from housing. (The same trend can be seen across the country, thanks to aggressive policies enacted under President Clinton in the 1990s.) The cruelty and negative impact of those policies are clear to see. If you are on parole or probation, it is a crime to be homeless. If you are living in public housing or your private landlord does not permit anyone with a criminal history to be in your apartment, you can be evicted for trying to help out a loved one by letting them stay with you. Some men and women languish in prison for months (or years) after their parole was scheduled to begin because they have nowhere to live.

Miller talks to a halfway house director who gets hundreds of applications every year for between 20 and 40 beds. Miller himself says no to his brothers request to stay with him because he could be evicted from his rented house for having his brother stay there. His brother ends up sleeping in a parking lot from time to time in Ann Arbor while he awaits trial.

This landscape exists for every person leaving prison or jail, and it is often one they have to learn to navigate alone. Want to get a job so that you can pay for an apartment that is not public housing? Good luck if you have a criminal record, even if all you hope to obtain is a minimum-wage job. Want to watch your child graduate from kindergarten? If you were in prison for over a year, your parental rights may have been terminated during your stay, and your child may no longer be yours.

Want to vote for a politician who may be able to make a change in your community? Sorry, a criminal record often revokes your voice in elections. Want to get on track with a new lifestyle and focus on your health? You are far behind the rest of us, as incarcerated persons are more likely than anyone else in the United States to contract communicable diseases and illnesses. Just look at the number of Covid-19 prison deaths in the United States to see the outsized impact this pandemic has had on those behind bars.

The men and women we meet through Miller find themselves rejected time and again in their efforts to establish safe new lives after incarceration. This makes Halfway Home a tough book to read. It should be.

It is an indictment of our society, the one with an ever-increasing wealth gap, the one that let me take out six figures in federal student loans because I am considered a trustworthy candidate but didnt let Yvette, one of Millers subjects, continue to work for her town because of an uncovered 10-year-old drug conviction, despite her excellence at her job.

I am not a stranger to the data points and the policy arguments for criminal justice reform and for the abolition of our current carceral state. As both a criminal defender and family defender for the last five years, I have watched the governments prosecutions tear apart Black families, force evictions and traumatize Black children. But at the end of the day, I can still close my files and go home without those stories following me. Miller brings us along on the car ride home, then shows us the musings on the couch and the celebration on the corners.

Halfway Home is an intimate portrayal of a vulnerable population; it is also important and necessary. Until there are laws and frameworks that clear the minefields of post-conviction life, we are all complicit in setting up our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, for failure. Until that culture of rejection turns into one of reception, this book will be necessary.

Miller does not apologize for having a dog in this fight. His proximity to his subjects and the world of mass incarceration, he believes, gives him the ability to communicate how this social situation feels in a forceful and straightforward way. I could not agree more.

I could not put this book down because I felt so connected to the author, his story and his subjects stories. I will be thinking about it for a long time.

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Review: Platitudes are not enough. We need to see criminal justice reform in action. - America Magazine

This story first appeared on TC Jewfolk and was distributed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Enzi Tanner didnt watch the trial of Derek Chauvin.

Even as the jury returned guilty verdicts Tuesday afternoon on all three counts against the former Minneapolis police officer second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter the community safety organizer at Jewish Community Action, a Minnesota social justice organization, had been thinking of issues bigger than the result.

My biggest concern before was in focusing solely on the trial, it makes us about one incident, Tanner said. Its about that 9 minutes and 29 seconds on May 25. And thats what it ends up being about and not the broader system. Even in the trial, people are arguing that Derek Chauvin is a rogue police officer, that hes not typical. And he is.

ForTanner, a Jew of color, the state of policing and public safety in the country is the intersection of his work as an organizer and who he is as a person. And the April 11 killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in nearby Brooklyn Center only strengthened his resolve to pursue broader efforts to transform public safety through his work at the Jewish Community Action, whichshifted last year to focus squarely on responding to George Floyds death. (The officer in the Wright killing has been charged with manslaughter.)

This last week actually provided more opportunities and more clarity than before, he said. Before the murder of Daunte Wright and around the trial, we [were] already planning and trying to work on some political education pieces on whats next.

Fueled by a belief that fear is holding back needed changes in policing, Tanner is putting together a workshop for his organization on anti-Black racism, fear and the need to be secure.

We have a narrative in this country about anti-Black racism and fear, and it allows for that confusion between security and actually being secure, he said. Fear is a physical reaction, its not just a psychological thing. When we watch scary movies, we actually react to that, so getting in tune with that, and our initial reactions, I just think thats important.

A virtual training on Sunday started tackling some of the difficult conversations that come around the topic of reimagining public safety. A portion of the training included about 20 minutes of breakout rooms with scenarios of how to practice having conversations about policing.

One of those needed conversations is about the movement to defund police in Minneapolis and beyond a term that Tanner says has a different meaning depending on whom you ask. To him, it means the middle ground between reform, which requires investing more money into police forces, and abolition, doing away with police entirely.

Folks who want to defund, its this middle ground. Its saying that we have enough resources as a community to provide for what we need, he said. When you talk about defunding, youre talking about reallocating, and as youre talking about reallocating, to me it actually opens up the world to dreaming of whats possible. How can we imagine a world in a society that weve never seen? And its scary as hell.

For Tanner, the road ahead is certain to be difficult but its one that he sees traversing nonetheless as an action with a deeply Jewish antecedent.

I just keep imagining our ancestors being at the Red Sea and being like, OK, you go, No, you go first. And then everyone else is like, This is a really bad idea, yall. We dont even know whats over there. We havent even seen it before. And I feel like, in many ways, we get a chance to do this, make mistakes, learn and grow, he said.

The U.S. Justice Departmentannounced Wednesday, a day after Chauvins conviction, that it would investigate the Minneapolis Police Department. Previous investigations have ended with agreements, known as consent decrees, between federal and local authorities to changes in policing and oversight.

Regardless of the conviction, Tanner said justice isnt done.

There is no justice, he said, because there is no redemption or repair in a cage.

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For Minneapolis Jews, Derek Chauvin's conviction is just the beginning J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

Joshua Deveer doesnt try to fight his place in life anymore.

I used to think doing something was everything, and now Im starting to realize that, maybe not doing something is everything, says the 23-year-old from outside of a modest North Conway inn, where he pays $600 per month to live. Maybe restricting my footprint here, making sure that I watch my steps is whats most important.

In July of 2017, Deveer was pulled over by State Trooper Clinton Trussell and arrested on two misdemeanor charges and one violation: operating without a valid license, disobeying a police officer and possessing marijuana.

According to Carroll County court records, police signaled for Deveer to stop by emergency warning signals, but that he took evasive action by turning abruptly, with a signal, behind a building.

I said, I didnt know that I was disobeying an officer, sir. And he basically told me that I was under arrest already. Cause I was disobeying him by pulling into a parking lot. And so I should get outta the car and put my hands on my lock box, Deveer said.

He says he also was not aware that his license had been under suspension, and that he felt he shouldnt have had any charges against him at all. Deveer ended up paying over $700 in fines for two of the charges, but for the marijuana charge, he was offered another option.

With the help of a lawyer, Deveer was able to get the marijuana charge diverted to White Mountain Restorative Justice located in Conway, NH. WMRJ is a non-profit organization offering programs in juvenile court diversion, mediation, adult court diversion, and victim offender mediation.

Upon completing a court diversion program with WMRJ, Deveer was able to have the charge expunged from his record. The program, he says, consisted of first admitting guilt, completing course work, and community service at the humane society for a few months.

I wanted it dismissed completely. I didnt want people, you know...thinking any differently of me, but then it got published in the paper. So I moved away from here for a while after that, he said.

Restorative justice is the practice of repairing the harm caused by crimes or offenses and holding the offender accountable for their actions. It also focuses on the causes of crime, rather than taking punitive measures that are likely to cause recidivism. And as calls for criminal justice reform and police abolition have continued alongside protests throughout 2020, many activists are looking to restorative justice as a solution to the countrys policing and mass incarceration problems.

Diversion for adults often happens pre-conviction, and unlike New Hampshires drug courts and mental health courts if an offender successfully carries out a restorative agreement, the charge will be expunged from the offenders record.

Its a process with a different purpose and goal from the states behavioral health courts, which are reserved for those with serious addiction or mental health problems who are repeat offenders. And with specialized courts, charges remain on an offenders record after completion.

Experts see court diversion as a form of restorative justice, and a powerful alternative to traditional sentencing, that can save lives. The programs often involve not only community service and restitution to crime victims, but also mental health and addiction services.

People shouldnt be defined by the worst day of their life. You can wreck a life with a conviction and a short prison sentence, says Michael Sheehan, a Concord attorney and vice president of New Hampshire Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform.

And restorative justice has the results to prove that it works. According to the most recent department of corrections data on state recidivism rates, 43.2 percent of offenders reoffend after release from prison, a rate 15 percent higher than those who completed a restorative justice program in Belknap county.

But New Hampshires system of court diversion is largely inconsistent, and access to it is not distributed equitably across the state. That also means the state doesnt track adult diversion data and recidivism rates, which makes quantifying the success of diversion nearly impossible.

I do wish they were more widely available, said Robin Melone, an attorney based in Manchester. I think it would spare a significant number of defendants from having criminal records, it would save court resources and would serve to better defendants more than punish them while still holding them accountable and getting them services that could be life changing.

Ive had co-defendants...and one is referred to diversion and the other defendant who has a mirror image background, isnt, says Alyson Mahler, diversion coordinator for Rockingham County. When they tell me, my girlfriend was with me, she was arrested, Im like, is she getting diversion too? No, she doesnt know about it.

It can be a problem for defendants with attorneys from counties without adult diversion as an option, or even attorneys from out-of-state. If the attorney isnt aware of the option, it may not be offered by a judge or prosecutor at all. Diversion practitioners say they do their best to educate as much as they can about their services, but its also attorneys jobs to do that work themselves.

Funding issues, too, have led to constant shifts and changes to where and how diversion is accessible to adults. It varies by county, and three counties in the state Cheshire, Coos and Hillsborough dont have diversion as an option for adults at all. Some counties, like Strafford, only do about 18 adult felony diversions per year. Most wont accept people who have already offended in the past.

In some cases, you may be lucky to have possessed a controlled drug in Belknap County because you can get a second chance. But if you happen to live in Coos or Hillsborough counties, your charge may very likely remain on your record.

Avoiding the criminal justice system can be a matter of luck

Diversion didnt keep Deveer out of trouble. He was able to lose the marijuana charge, but the other two disobeying an officer and driving without a valid license remain on his record. He maintains that he shouldnt have received those charges in the first place.

I guess I didnt think I had to be in the situation in general, so Im kind of on that bias, but at the same time...Even Lance (the director of White Mountain Restorative Justice) kind of knew that kids just had to put their hours in and then they were done. Like, it was very brief, but some of the knowledge mightve been useful to people, Deveer said.

In 2018, Deveer was arrested again, this time for criminal threatening in Derry. Since it was his third charge, he was not eligible for diversion in Rockingham, which is mainly reserved for first-time offenders, but decisions are mainly left up to prosecutors for whether they believe diversion would be appropriate or beneficial.

He says he feels like just another number caught in the system, like theres no escape, even though the point of diversion is to keep people out of the criminal justice system in the first place.

Were not taken as one person. Were taken as a group of people that got mixed up in something, Deveer says.

He grew up with a mother and brother who struggled with mental illness. By age 18 he was enrolled at NHTI, hoping to pursue his interest in history. But he dropped out after his first arrest, tried to enlist in the military and couldnt get in. After a quick stint at New Hampshire Hospital this summer where he was detained for mental health reasons, hes out of a job and continues to feel the impact of his past.

[It has affected] every part of my life. Ive only been able to work construction. I wasnt able to go back to school, I wasnt able to go into the military. Every time I get pulled over, Im questioned way more than I need to be, he says.

If Deveer was in a different county, he might have had better luck. Diversion programs across the state generally do not address violent crimes, but if they have the capacity, some may accept repeat offenders, like Belknap. But since there is no state statute for adult diversion on the books, eligibility is different for nearly every program.

Due to the circumstances that weve seen, not just in our state, but across the country with the opiate issue and with drugs, were seeing a lot more people coming into our program that have previous convictions, whether they be misdemeanors or minor, low level felonies, said Mike MacFadzen, director of Belknap County Restorative Justice.

That wasnt always the case. Restorative justice has existed in Belknap since 2001, when the county received a federal grant to start a program there. Eventually, it was taken over by the Sheriffs office and became a separate department due to its success, remembers Brian Loanes, Belknap County Restorative Justices first director.

Back then, the program only accepted juveniles. But those in the criminal justice field soon saw how it could be beneficial for adults, too.

Very common cases wed have was an 18 or 19-year-old had committed an offense and they had their whole life ahead of them, and having a criminal conviction on their record has adverse effects on serving in the military and going to college, Loanes said.

Today, Belknap County diverts more adults than juveniles. Its more common to divert a younger adult between the ages of 18-25, but MacFadzen says all ages are accepted and determinations are made case by case.

When it comes to counties like Belknap, MacFadzen believes that availability of services could be expanded if only the money was there. He and three part-time case managers dealt with 202 referrals in 2019 on a county budget of $185,000. That ended up covering about 20 percent of total docketed cases in the county, according to County Prosecutor Andrew Livernois.

If we had more funding and more availability of case managers, we could definitely be able to take in and provide services to those who are committing those misdemeanor first time offenses, those young 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds. And right now were not seeing them just because were dealing with the more serious cases, he said.

In 2016, an attempt at keeping youth and adults out of the criminal justice system came to an abrupt end in Carroll County.

Things went south shortly after the program began just a few years before, at least financially. According to an attorney generals report on the Tri County Community Action Program (Tri-CCAP) in 2015, the program was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating costs. And in 2012, state incentive funds for diversion programs had dried up, leading to the closure of several diversion centers across the state.

Diversion has been in the state of New Hampshire since 1980. This conversation has been had 100 times over. For a long time theyve been talking about how to fund this and how to do this, said Nicole Rodler, chair of the New Hampshire Youth Diversion Network. They run on absolute bare bones...at one point we had 33-35 programs across our state that closed their doors after incentive funding dried up.

Keeping the Tri-CCAP program around just didnt seem sustainable, or even worth it based on low enrollment numbers, said Jeanne Robillard, current CEO of Tri-CCAP.

One of the things that the board needed to look at was revisiting our mission, Robillard said. We had a fair amount of mission drift, and we were taking a look at the programs and the services that we were looking at, she said.

Lance Zack, then program director of diversion at Tri-CCAP, decided to take on the mission himself. About three years ago, he opened White Mountain Restorative Justice in Conway, where he now guides first-time low-level offenders both juveniles and adults through restorative justice processes.

While Carroll Countys adult diversion still exists today under Zacks leadership, hes worried about its future. Zacks program is a sole proprietorship and the only one of its kind in Carroll County. He doesnt operate under a county attorney or corrections department like some programs, and he isnt an accredited member of the youth diversion network, meaning he cant access for grant funds through it. Hes been working on incorporating the business in order to have better access to funding, but COVID-19 has put a temporary halt on that process.

My reality is, Ive been without any viable income, basically paying my rent for four months and now laying down $4,000 for the incorporation process itself, Zack said.

White Mountain Restorative Justice survives on only program fees: $250 per person, much lower than most other adult programs. In Grafton, a felony charge can set an offender back $600 plus extra fees for missed appointments or additional classes, which may be mandatory to complete diversion and get ones record expunged.

That can be a barrier to some adults and youth, especially those who are low-income or live far from where the diversion center is based. Paying a court fine may be more affordable and practical than a months-long laborious program.

Money should not make a difference but my time in private practice has made it clear that it does in fact make a difference, said Melone, the attorney from Manchester. I dont think it is that the prosecutors are less sympathetic to indigent clients - I think it is that indigent clients have fewer resources to help an attorney put together an attractive proposal.

But that can cause big problems in a young adults life, especially when it comes to marijuana charges, Zack says. He knows offenders who have decided to pay a court fine for marijuana possession rather than doing diversion and ended being boxed out of college, the military and unions that have zero-tolerance substance use policies.

You put yourself into New Hampshire Tech for two years, intern for a year and find out that after your internship, the union turns you down because you paid a cash fine on an alcohol charge. Ive seen it jam too many kids, he said.

Zack hopes by incorporating White Mountain Restorative Justice, the fee can be reduced or completely eliminated.

That was part of my motivation looking to incorporate, was looking for external funding. I believe diversion should have a fee associated with it, its about personal accountability, but I believe the fee also has to be associated with the fact that this is the second poorest county in the state in a state thats already poor on national ratings, Zack says.

Three counties have no adult diversion at all. One of those is Hillsborough, which, encompassing both Manchester and Nashua, is New Hampshires most densely populated county, the most racially diverse and has the highest crime volume.

Most adult diversion is done as a court sentence or as an order by police or county prosecutors, as opposed to juvenile diversion cases, a majority of which are diverted pre-court by police. Hillsborough County attorney Michael Conlon believes diversion should be done at the pre-court level for everyone and is not the county attorneys responsibility to implement.

Diversion primarily doesnt exist [in Hillsborough] because police departments havent implemented it, Conlon said. Diversion is usually described as a referral to a program or service in lieu of arrest.

And for diversion to be done properly, he believes, it shouldnt be up to each individual county.

What we really need is a uniform statewide funding, programming and services for these things, Conlon said. When we take away the statewide aspect of it, what you get is this mismatch of services that are helping some people in some counties and not helping people in others. And theres no reason for that other than a lack of will to do it and to fund it.

It would take a lot of work to make that happen, and until very recently, there hasnt been a champion for statewide, universal court diversion for adults or juveniles, noted Moira ONeill, New Hampshires Child Advocate.

State defense attorneys, although they have major concerns about equality of accessibility to diversion, are not able to take legal action because of lack of specificity within the juvenile statute, and total lack of an adult statute, said Tracy Scavarelli, director of legal services at the New Hampshire Public Defender.

Diversion is solely within the purview of the prosecutor, so theres no real guarantee for anyone to obtain diversion, so its difficult to make the argument that anything is unfair based on that, she said.

The inconsistency and seemingly arbitrary nature of diversion programs that Scavarelli speaks of is the case in Sullivan County where County Prosecutor Marc Hathaway opposes spending money on diversion.

Hathaway cited scarce resources and the ability of prosecutors and police to create their own diversion by determining what cases are prosecuted, as two reasons why adult diversion programs do not make sense in his county.

I dont think theres a tremendous amount of benefit in a diversion program. The rationale for a diversion is that the individual and the crime combined are unworthy of intervention by the criminal justice system, Hathaway said. If thats true, then why build a program in the criminal justice system around a case that you would not and should not prosecute? We have scarce resources in this community and if we think something is de minimis, society has a very simple way of addressing that. The decision not to prosecute.

Asked whether he agreed with data that shows a reduction in recidivism rates for those who have completed a diversion program compared with those recently released from prison, Hathaway said he doesnt find this to be a fair comparison.

A closer comparison would be those who have no, or minor prior record and are given a suspended sentence with/or without probation because the combination of the offense and the offenders history did not warrant incarceration, he explained. In a world of scarce resources our approach should be more targeted. If we have a program and it fails what do you believe the response should look like? Failure without a consequence is a bad message.

New light for diversion programs is slowly beginning to emerge as new waves of activism have swept the state this summer. Black Lives Matter Seacoast included full support and the usage of diversion programs for those with mental health and substance use issues on its list of demands to local officials.

Clifton West, a co-founder of BLM Seacoast, says he and other organizers have been working with lawmakers and police departments in the area to inform them of diversion services that are already available, and encourage the use of diversion more consistently.

He believes that communities should divest in policing and instead invest in diversion to prevent further crime, and therefore reduce the need for more law enforcement.

To me, its not an option, we have to do it, West says. I think its crazy if you dont look at the statistics that we have seen around the country and go eh, thats an option but we just like funding the police the way we do.

Americas obsession with discriminatory mass arrest and incarceration has its place in New Hampshire as much as anywhere else in the United States. According to the Sentencing Project, the Granite State incarcerates Black people more than five times as frequently as white people.

And people of color are heavily overrepresented in the states justice system: while Black and Hispanic people make up just over 4 percent of the state population, they represent about 14 percent of those incarcerated.

While discrimination is possible within diversion as much as any system, West says with proper representation and training, it could be a remedy to the problem.

If you have these diversion programs, it would help not only bring down mass incarceration and arrest in general, it would I think help bring that type of trust back to the community, it would help bring law enforcement together with the community as well, West said.

And existing adult diversion programs, for the first time, are taking matters into their own hands by creating an adult diversion network to better combine efforts and resources and hopefully create more universality of requirements and services across counties.

One of the big drivers to doing that was, if Tom Smith commits a crime in Merrimack County and completes diversion and then comes to Grafton County and commits a crime, we wouldnt know that they had completed diversion because the charge is nolle prossed. So they could get diversion again, when they shouldnt, says Renee DePalo, Grafton Countys alternative sentencing coordinator.

Theyre hoping to create a database to more consistently track data on who goes in and out of the states adult diversion programs. But that costs money that would, as of now, have to come out of each programs own budget.

Neighboring Vermont, which has community justice and diversion for adults and juveniles written into statute itself used to have a community justice network that recently disbanded due to funding issues and differing philosophies. But since its written into statute and state funded, services are still more consistent than they are in New Hampshire.

If this were statewide and it were actually in the law to refer people to diversion, there would be a lot less criminal issues on our hands I think, Porreca, of Valley Diversion, said.

Editors Note: This series on court diversion is part of a multiyear project exploring race and equity in New Hampshire produced by the partners of The Granite State News Collaborative. The editing team included Scott Merrill, Editor, NH Bar News; and Ben Conant, Editor, Monadnock Ledger-Transcript. The reporting and research team included: John M. Bassett, Jordyn Haime, Kathie Ragsdale, Fiona St. Pierre, and Adam Urquhart.

The series was supported by a competitive grant from the nonpartisan Solutions Journalism Network. The Collaborative and its partners retain editorial control.

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Restorative Justice, Part 2: N.H. adult court diversion can save lives, but is offered inconsistently and not tracked - Monadnock Ledger Transcript

The Prison Abolition Collective at the University of Massachusetts hosted a panel discussion titled The Pandemic Behind Bars: Covid-19 in U.S. Prisons on Tuesday. The event featured five speakers who have been at the vanguard of the pandemic in prisons for the last year.

The panelists, most of whom have been previously incarcerated, highlighted the inhumane conditions of COVID-19 isolation areas in prisons. They discussed the overarching implications of the negligence toward incarcerated people seen throughout the pandemic as well as other topics related to the state of the prison system.

Ernst Fenelon Jr., one of the five panelists, is an author, public speaker and program coordinator with the Prison Education Project. He stressed the importance of advocacy in regard to healthcare in prisons.

Its so important that were all here, and all of you are part of this experience and conversation, to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves, he said.

Razvan Sibii, a senior lecturer in the UMass journalism department, moderated the event. A freelance journalist, Sibii teaches several courses at UMass, including those about the mass incarceration system, journalism workshops in the Hampshire County Jail and social justice journalism to a mixed class of UMass students and incarcerated men. He also writes a monthly column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette about incarceration and immigration.

The event kicked off with opening remarks from Claire Healy, event organizer and a member of the Prison Abolition Collective, who highlighted the significance of hosting the event moments after the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin was delivered.

The panelists introduced themselves and briefly explained their connections to incarceration and COVID-19. The floor was then opened up for audience questions. This led to discussions about data transparency, vaccine distribution and prioritization, maintaining personal autonomy, information blackouts, healthcare rights of prisoners, and ensuring the accurate representation of incarcerated individuals.

Kathryn M. Nowotny, one of the panelists, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Miami. There, she researches what she describes as intersection between criminal justice and public health. She is also the co-founder of the COVID Prison Project, which collects information to create a database on the state of COVID-19 within correctional facilities in and around the country.

Nowotny highlighted the fact that incarcerated individuals are three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who are not. She also presented other stark statistics, including that 390,000, or 30 percent of the prison population, have been infected with COVID-19.

However, Nowotny believes these numbers are a gross undercount. She cited reasons for this, including the lack of data transparency, standardization and oversight in reporting COVID-19 cases. She also stated that the slow process of reporting deaths in custody and the low number of actual autopsies being performed also played a role in this inaccuracy.

Prisons, in a lot of ways, amplify disease risk, said Nowotny, describing the crowded and unsanitary conditions, as well as the lack of access to sanitary products like hand sanitizer, that exist in prisons.

Reflecting on the event, Nowotny praised the selection of panelists.

I was the only person that didnt have lived experience of incarceration on the panel, and I think thats really critical to hear from that kind of expertise, she said. That kind of firsthand narrative account is really hard to get outside the prison walls.

One of the panelists, Eugene Youngblood, endured firsthand these unsafe conditions after contracting COVID-19 in prison.

Youngblood was in prison for 29 years, where he was a leader in the Black Prisoners Caucus. Thirty days after finding out that his sentence was being commuted due to executive clemency from the governor, Youngblood contracted COVID-19 and spent 12 days in medical isolation.

He explained that all 375 people in his unit tested either positive or inconclusive. After medical isolation, 125 individuals were moved to a gym, exceeding its capacity. They shared six showers and six toilets, receiving minimal to no healthcare.

The best thing we got was bottled water, Youngblood said.

He survived the virus and was released from prison. He told the audience that Tuesday marked his 46th day of freedom. He is currently a care coordinator with the Washington-based Freedom Project, where he helps to identify the services for individuals who have been system-impacted.

Jesse Vasquez, former editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News, also had his sentence commuted by his governor and was released a year before the pandemic began. He explained that San Quentin prison was especially hard hit by the pandemic, resulting in 29 deaths (28 inmates and a staff member), including four of his friends and many of his acquaintances.

Vasquez said that leaving prison just one year before his cellmates would be impacted by the pandemic left him with a sense of survivors guilt.

I left my brothers back there, said Vasquez. I had never understood what it felt like to be the family member or friend of somebody that was incarcerated . . . I didnt understand it until COVID[-19] hit and then all of a sudden theres this fear of losing them.

He also observed the way that peoples attitudes change before and after the pandemic.

When it comes to public health crises, we are all equalall of a sudden, we recognize humanity, whereas beforewhy do I have to justify Im a human being? said Vasquez.

Vasquez now works with Arsolas Distribution Center and Community Services, helping formerly incarcerated individuals find transitional and permanent housing. On his own time, he works with members of his community in many other ways, including mentoring children. He emphasized the importance of being involved within the community to help curve incarceration.

The stories that we see today, they werent created in a vacuum. These social conditions, theyre systemic, said Vasquez in an interview after the event. Im not an abolitionist, but I hope one day, we will have less need of incarceration.

Page Dukes, who was released from prison four years ago, also has many loved ones who are still incarcerated. She is the communications associate for the Southern Center for Human Rights and co-founder of Mourning Our Losses, a crowd-sourced memorial that profiles those who have died of COVID-19 in prisons, jails and detention centers.

She described COVID-19 deaths in prison as justified negligence homicides. When she realized that many of those who lost their lives were not being named, she set out to memorialize them and create a space for disenfranchised grief for people in prison and their loved ones.

We wanted them to be represented as not just numbers on a dashboard but as people who had family members and loved ones and lives who had a right to exist just as much as anyone else, and who a right to medical attention, to care and to a chance to survive, Dukes said.

Fenelon Jr. is the senior program coordinator for the Prison Education Project, where he works to provide classes to those who are incarcerated. The PEC, which is based in California, is one of the largest volunteer-based prison education programs in the country.

The power of our program is really focused on trying to open up the door to the average citizen to get in and engage with those who are incarcerated, Fenelon Jr. said. So many decisions are made by those who have no engagement with those who are incarcerated.

He emphasized the importance of incarcerated individuals having some connection with others.

Part of illness is psychology, said Fenelon Jr. If you just know that someone cares, and is willing to make time to see you while youre in that environment, its critically important

Fenelon, who was incarcerated for 14 years, said that his experience with health issues in prison made him a stronger panelist to speak on the state of healthcare in general, but specifically for COVID-19 within the carceral environment.

Halfway through the event, Sibii posed a question to the panelists about the Commonwealth prioritizing incarcerated individuals in the vaccine distribution as well as vaccine hesitancy within prisons.

Many of the panelists emphasized the importance of providing additional guidance to incarcerated individuals so they can have the ability to make an educated decision on whether they want to receive the vaccine or not.

Having informed choices, youll find the majority will [take the vaccine], and those who dont, then you can address them in a way that is still effective and will respect their agency, Fenelon Jr. said.

Yumi Cruz, a social thought and political economy major and member of the UMass PAC, facilitated the Q&A portion with Sibii and posed the question, How does the systemic response to the pandemic reflect the general attitude towards incarcerated individuals?

Nowotny, like other panelists, said it reflected how the public assigns less deservedness to those who are incarcerated. She rhetorically asked, Why is it that the CARES Act spent an ungodly number of pages talking about nursing homes but not prisons? They both congregate living facilities that house people at high risk for COVID-19 and severe illness.

The panelists also emphasized the importance of journalism and using humanizing language when talking about incarcerated individuals. Vasquez highlighted the issue of sensationalism in the media, including how some media agencies choose to profile people with the most heinous criminal records and fringe incidents when reporting on incarcerated individuals.

The same way we hold the state accountable for their lack of action and their ill response, is the same way we should hold media agencies accountable for their willingness to perpetuate this institutional racism that exists, said Vasquez.

The event ran for approximately an hour and a half. During that time, there were some issues that the panel had not discussed, Vasquez said. For example, the number of moving parts that factor into the issue of incarceration and combatting COVID-19, the weaponization of the pandemic to fit certain narratives, and the idea of having room for compassion and understanding thatthis was an unknown beast, he said.

The government is culpable to the extent that they can be for not responding to the way that they could have, but they had no alternatives. COVID had never struck before, said Vasquez.

The event amassed around 60 attendees. Shane Appiah, an incoming freshman at Howard University, was one audience member. He found out about the event through Decarcerate Western Mass, a coalition that he has been involved with for the last five months.

I am definitely left with more hope about abolitionist work [and] hope about the people who are doing the work, Appiah said. Its spreading, its becoming a stronger thing that Western Mass is rallying behind.

While considering the events takeaways, Fenelon Jr. said he hopes that audience members will remember to care.

Care about people wherever they are, regardless of their circumstances [and] how they got there whether theyre on the street, in prison, in a nursing home, he said.

Nowotny, on a similar but different note, hopes that the events audience was angered enough to be moved to action.

Anger is a powerful emotion, and it drives a lot of the work that I do, she said. The more you learn, the more pissed off you get at the injustices that you see If you bear witness to that, hopefully, you can become angry enough to be able to take action and do something about it.

Editors note: Claire Healy is an Assistant News Editor at the Daily Collegian.

Sara Abdelouahed can be reached at[emailprotected]. Follow her on Twitter @AbdelouahedSara.

Saliha Bayrak can be reached at[emailprotected]. Follow her on Twitter @salihabayrak_.

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'The pandemic behind bars:' Panelists discuss effects of COVID-19 in prisons - The Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Welcome to The Spinoffs live updates for April 21, bringing you the latest news updated throughout the day. Get in touch at stewart@thespinoff.co.nz

The prime minister Jacinda Ardern and governor general Patsy Reddy are among those attending a memorial service for Prince Philip in Wellington today.

The Duke of Edingburgh, who died almost two weeks ago at the age of 99, was farewelled by the Royal Family in the UK on Saturday.

Today, a state memorial is being held in Wellington at the Cathedral of St Paul. The Duke had visited the cathedral on several visits to New Zealand, most recently in 2002.

Its been a massive news day and I am very tired. If youre looking for other stuff to read this arvo, check out:

Updated

The link between a new case of Covid-19 and a recent returnee has strengthened. Chris Hipkins has confirmed the latest case a cleaner at Auckland Airport had cleaned the plane that brought the returnee to New Zealand on April 10, from Ethiopia via the UAE.

The worker tested positive on Monday during weekly routine testing, having tested negative a week prior.

At this stage, there are no new cases of Covid-19 linked to the worker. The person has 25 close contacts including 17 work colleagues seven of whom have returned negative results. The person worked three shifts during their infectious period.

The person wore full PPE while cleaning and cleaned planes from green zone countries as well as red zones, said Hipkins.

We have been in touch with Australian authorities about the case, and believe there is no risk to people travelling on those green zone planes to and from Australia, he added.

Meanwhile, Hipkins announced he had received his second dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 jab. I know you all want to know Im feeling fine. Once again it was a trouble-free experience, said Hipkins.

As of last night, 183,351 doses of the vaccine have been administered to date. Hipkins said the vaccine roll-out is on track. 41% of the first dose vaccinations have been delivered in the Auckland region, with 19% Mori or Pasifika.

Only 16,314 of the estimated 50,000-odd household contacts of border workers have received their first vaccine dose, said Hipkins. Id like that number to be higher.

Hipkins said he is writing to the chief executives of all of the companies involved in our border and managed isolation response, reminding them that their staff need to be getting regular Covid-19 tests.

Finally, Hipkins acknowledged news of people handing out factually incorrect pamphlets about mask wearing to Wellington commuters. My message to all those coming through the Wellington train station is if you receive one of these pamphlets, the Wellington train station has helpfully provided a variety of receptacles for these theyre called the rubbish bin.

This groups actions are highly disrespectful to the small group of people who legitimately do require an exemption for a mask, said Hipkins.

There is just one new case of Covid-19 in managed isolation today: an arrival from Switzerland who tested positive after a routine day three test.

Its been a massive morning of news: heres what you need to know today.

The Veils singer talks us through his first big onstage disaster, first musical hero and more in our new video and podcast interview series.

Subscribe and listen toFIRSTon your favourite podcast provider.

Transport prices rose by almost 4% in the March quarter the highest quarterly rise in more than a decade.

That, coupled with a 1% rise for housing, pushed the consumers prices index up a mere 0.8%, said Stats NZ.

Meanwhile, petrol prices rose by a substantial 7.2% (the biggest quarterly rise since mid-20165) but, overall, theyre currently down 3.8% on the same time in 2020.

Global oil prices plunged in early 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Prices have risen since then, prices senior manager Aaron Beck said.

Conspiracy theorists rallied by former political hopeful Billy Te Kahika have been handing out anti-mask propaganda to Wellington commuters.

Official-looking pamphlets titled Whats all the fuss about masks? were given to people waiting to board trains out of the capital at peak hours yesterday, reports RNZ.

The flyers that matched the official Ministry of Health Covid-19 colour scheme and came complete with logos were created by Te Kahikas group The Freedom Alliance. It even included an exemption card that purported to tell commuters they could opt-out of wearing a face mask on public transport.

According to RNZ, one of those handing out the pamphlets was a self-confessed conspiracy theorist called Mike a volunteer for the Freedom Alliance. He said he had not actually read the pamphlet he was giving out and had no idea it had not been approved by the Ministry of Health.

Well, this whole Covid thing is not just masks, its everything. Its about the lockdown. Its about the vaccinations. This is only a tiny element, he said.

Read Charlotte Cooks full report here and, if youre interested, you can check out a new feature on Covid-19 conspiracy theories in the wellness community here.

If you need more detail on the major health sector reforms announced this morning (see here), Bulletin editor Alex Braae has put together a substantive explainer that should give you all you need to know.

Check that out here

The opposition has criticised todays major health reforms, saying the abolition of District Health Boards will see our regions and smaller communities lose their voice and their autonomy. The party has pledged to repeal the newly announced centralised health service and seperate Mori Health Authority, if re-elected in 2023.

Our regions know what works for them when it comes to keeping their communities healthy, and that isnt always having Wellington dictate terms, Nationals health spokesperson Shane Reti said in a statement.

Removing DHBs is similar to when Regional Health Authorities were centralised, it didnt work then and it wont work now.

Reti said that the government should have considering consolidating some DHB functions, rather than centralising the entire system.

We have no idea how much this plan will cost, how long it will take to implement, or how disruptive this process is going to be, Reti added.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, party leader Judith Collins has retweeted a post claiming that the new Mori Health Authority is separatist.

Collins also agreed with one tweeter who said the sweeping health reforms will be a cluster F.

Taking the focus off getting vaccines out, Collins said. Remember when we would have the winter flu vaccine out by this time each year.

Former US cop Derek Chauvin has been found guilty of the murder of George Floyd.

Chauvin was convicted by a racially diverse jury that had been deliberating for the past two and a half days.

Floyd died last May after Chauvin pinned him down by the neck for more than nine minutes, triggering worldwide protests against police brutality and racism.

Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was convicted on all three counts.

According to US media, the conviction could see Chauvin put behind bars for most of his life if the harshest sentences are handed down. The maximum sentence for second-degree unintentional murder is imprisonment of not more than 40 years, while Chauvin could face 25 years in prison for third-degree murder an additional decades for the manslaughter conviction.

Chauvin had pleaded not guilty on all charges.

Ahead of the verdict, protests in Minneapolis were predicted: some stores were boarded up, the courthouse was surrounded by concrete barriers and razor wire, and thousands of National Guard troops were on standby.

Earlier today, president Joe Biden admitted he was praying for Chauvin to be convicted and had spoken to Floyds family.

Theyre a good family and theyre calling for peace and tranquility no matter what that verdict is, Biden said. Im praying the verdict is the right verdict. I think its overwhelming, in my view. I wouldnt say that unless the jury was sequestered now.

(Photo: Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)

Were briefly jumping away from the health announcement here in New Zealand (see below) to the trial of former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin, charged with the murder of George Floyd.

Floyd died last May after Chauvin pinned him down by the neck for more than nine minutes, triggering worldwide protests against police brutality and racism.

Today, US president Joe Biden controversially weighed into the trial, saying he was praying for the right verdict. I think its overwhelming, in my view. I wouldnt say that unless the jury was sequestered now.

According to local media, the jury has reached its verdict and were expecting it to be delivered any minute now.

Watch live:

Updated

The government has revealed sweeping changes to the health sector, abolishing all 20 District Health Boards and replacing them with a national health service Health New Zealand.

A new Mori Health Authority will also be established that will have the power to commission health services, monitor the state of Mori health and develop policy.

Todays announcement goes well beyond a significant health report delivered to the government last year that recommended halving the number of DHBs, but preserving the existing system.

Speaking at parliament, health minister Andrew Little said the changes would see the end of the postcode lottery and mean that health workers can focus on helping people rather than battling bureaucracy.

The reforms will mean that for the first time, we will have a truly national health system, and the kind of treatment people get will no longer be determined by where they live, Little said.

The new system will be overseen by a strengthened Ministry of Health, said Little, which will also advise the government on policy matters. The ministry will continue to be fronted by the director general of health.

The reforms herald a change in focus for the health system we will treat people before they get sick so they dont need to go to hospital, thereby taking the pressure off hospitals, Little said.The reforms will also ensure the system is able to cope with the effects of an ageing population and respond more quickly to public health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic.

Also at the announcement was associate health minister Peeni Henare, who said Mori continue to lag behind in key health status indicators. Mori health has suffered under the current system for too long, Henare said. We will legislate for a new independent voice the Mori Health Authority to drive hauora Mori and lead the system to make real change.

Little said that the Covid-19 pandemic is not a reason to preserve the current system, but instead shows what can be achieved when all 20 DHBs work as one. That is exactly what the current reforms aim to do. I am mindful we need to progress carefully and not disrupt day-to-day health services. No one should miss out because the system was distracted by change, he said.

Maintaining services including the Covid-19 vaccination programme will be a priority during the transition, Little confirmed.

The new health system is expected to be in place by July next year.

Watch below:

Genomic testing has confirmed a direct link between the latest case of Covid-19 a worker at Auckland Airport and a recent arrival who landed in the country on April 10. Its also confirmed the worker, who cleans planes that have arrived from red zone countries, has contracted the highly transmissible UK strain of the virus.

Speaking to RNZ, Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said that at this stage there was no risk to the trans-Tasman bubble as a result of the new case.

Based on the genomic testing, health officials are confident that the worker caught the virus directly from the Covid-positive arrival with no intermediaries. Looking at the [testing] it would suggest that it was direct person-to-person, Hipkins said.

Asked how the virus may have spread, Hipkins said an investigation was still under way but posited that it could be to do with the planes air conditioning being switched off for cleaning. Its possible that if someone with Covid-19 has been leaving droplets in the air the air is quite stagnant, he suggested.

Based on the information he has so far received, Hipkins said the worker had been doing everything right before their Covid-19 diagnosis. The worker concerned was a very diligent worker, signed in regularly, was tested like clockwork every week, had both their vaccinations early in the programmes, wore PPE as appropriate if there are any issues here that will be highlighted [in the report], he said.

Last night, three locations of interest were released in relation to this new case.

They are:

A scathing review has outlined how the budget blew out for major Wellington road Transmission Gully.AsStuffsThomas Coughlan reports, the contract was put out at an unrealistically low price in the first place, and that key errors were made when in 2012 the National government decided to change it from a public works project to a public-private partnership. The details of the story reveal some remarkable moments of magical thinking on the part of those involved, for example, see this paragraph:

Setting the tender price so low meant firms were tendering for a project knowing that it was unrealistic to be able to deliver it at that cost. The review noted that setting the price low essentially double counted cost savings because the public sector figure was already required to consider the most efficient and cost-effective way of doing things.

That has put those who were around in the previous government on the back foot.Nationals transport spokesperson Michael Woodhouse said the report makes some quite outrageous comments that imply that the contractors were forced into signing up to a contract in other words, if they didnt like it, they shouldnt have signed on, reportsRadio NZ. He also took something of an alls well that ends well view of it, saying Transmission Gully will actually soon be finished and open. The road is being delivered behind schedule, but in fairness that schedule included an earthquake, which made delays inevitable.

What does it mean for the future of massive projects like this?Infrastructure NZ put out a release noting the criticisms, but defending the concept of PPPs as being useful. New Zealand has a very large nation-building investment programme ahead. Use of private capital to manage public cashflows, inject innovation, attract international expertise and better allocate risk is critical to successful delivery, said INZ policy director Hamish Glenn. But I think its also worth looking back at this piece onThe Spinofffrom last year by Matt Lowrie, which argued that Transmission Gully showed how dangerous PPPs could be. A key line: With interest rates at record lows and much of the risk still sitting with the government, its hard to see what value PPPs bring other than delivering good returns to private financiers.

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Excerpt from:

Live updates, April 21: Confirmed Airport worker infected with Covid-19 after cleaning plane - The Spinoff

While protesters in Minneapolis cheered Tuesday aftera jury convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of all three counts in the death of George Floyd,the verdict brought mixed emotions for some members of theBlack, Indigenous and people of colour(BIPOC) community in Windsor-Essex.

For artist and community leader Teajai Travis, the outcome was expected.And while he wants to feel proud and excited, he saidthere's still a long way to go to achieve "true justice."

"I knew in my heart it was going to come 'guilty, guilty, guilty,'" he said. "To hear that justice is being served in this manner, it's a real show of the global solidarity that we've seen that got behind. A movement that says 'it's no longer OKto brutalize and to murder Black and Indigenous bodies.'"

"But at the same time, we still have to deal with the fact that people are still being brutalized right now. This is something that feels like justice, but true justice is real peace, understanding. Justice is all people's ability to walk down the streets of their communities and not have to fear making it home. Justice is George Floyd not being dead," he said.

Travis said it's a sweet day for those who fought hard to hold the former officer accountable and the local community should appreciate each other, especially those who protested and marched last year.

Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Floyd after the former officerkneeled on his back and neckfor more than nineminutesduring an arrest last May.

The killing of Floyd sparked worldwide protests, including ones organized in the region, and a furious re-examination of racism and policing in the U.S..

Elise Harding-Davis, African-Canadian heritage consultant and historian, believes the verdict is a step in the right direction.

"I hope this will be a furtherance of a justice system that works for everyone," she said. "I've never seen anything so horrific in my life, but I'm so glad that the jury saw fit to take justice into their own hands and be honest and not be fearful of retribution, and find that man guilty."

"I hope that Derek Chauvin gets the longest time in jail so he can contemplate the ugliness that he portrayed and the suffering he committed on the world," she said.

While Harding-Davis saidshe hopes the verdict will lead to a push for a more representative police force in Windsor-Essex, law student Seher Ali is a proponent of the police abolition movement.

"There is no justice in a system that is fundamentally anti-Black and unjust, and a conviction is the baseline," she said. "Black communities deserve so much more than that, and to me, that includes the abolition of the anti-Black policing systems."

Ali pointed outthe death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was fatally shot last weekby now-former Minnesota police officer, Kimberly Ann Potter, as an example of why people need to continue organizing and fighting for justice.

"Anti-Blackness is a global construct and white supremacy is a global construct. Anti-Black policing is very common here as well," she said.

"It's important to remember that work still needs to be done around these issues globally and there is a demand for radical Black organizing within Windsor," she said, adding that she would like to see more reading around police abolition in school.

"Specifically as a law student at [the University of Windsor Faculty of Law], I wish that there was more reading of writers like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, reading about the Black Panthers, reading about the abolition movements, so that people can have a fleshed out understanding and apply these concepts to the experiences of Black students on our campus."

Travis agrees that more work needs to be done, reiterating "we have so far to go."

"The burnout is real, the trauma is real, the generational trauma is real, a system that has been built toprivilegesome at the oppression of others is real," he said.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of.You can read more stories here.

Read more here:

'Justice is George Floyd not being dead:' Members of Windsor-Essex BIPOC community reflect on verdict - CBC.ca