Daily Archives: May 27, 2021

LAHORE - Punjab Chief Minister Sardar Usman Buzdar Friday announced to abolish all the unnecessary amendments to Sugar Factories Control Act to make it farmer-friendly.

During a meeting with Pakistan Kissan Ittehad (PKI) president Khalid Khokar, the chief minister said that bumper crop was produced this year and the farmers had been rewarded for their hard work. The sugarcane farmers had to protest on roads for the payment of their dues in the past, and they remained hostage to powerful mafia. The PTI government has given farmers their rights, and legal protection has also been provided to sugarcane growers, he said. The chief minister said that the pending dues worth Rs26 billion had been recovered from sugar mills, adding that the sugarcane growers would get full reward of their hard work in future. The farmers rights will be protected and more facilities will be provided to increase yield, he said, adding The year 2021 will be the year of increase in productivity and policies will be formulated in consultation with farmers.

The CM directed the officials concerned to prepare working papers for a solution to farmers problems, and he also ordered effective steps for the manufacturing of vaccines for foot and mouth diseases at local level.

He said that adhoc recruitments in the agriculture department had been approved to fulfill the shortage of essential human resources. The CM also directed timely completion of desilting. He further stated that the scope of Kissan Card for subsidy on agri-inputs would be extended to the whole of the province.

The PKI president thanked the CM and appreciated the steps taken by the PTI government for the welfare of farmers. Provincial ministers and officials of Agriculture and Food Departments also attended the meeting.

CMs message on 70 years of Pak-China relations

Punjab Chief Minister Sardar Usman Buzdar said that the journey of strong brotherly relations between Pakistan and China had started 70 years ago, and it was filled with brotherly love, affection and sincerity.

In his message, the CM said that the friendship between Pakistan and China had no example in the history, adding that the association had met every challenge. The Pakistan-China friendship is appreciated in the global community as both countries are intertwined in strong bonds of respect, honour and affection, he added.

He said that the relations between the two countries were touching new heights under the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan.

He said that China had always extended full support to Pakistan in every difficulty, adding that China had achieved the pinnacle of glory with hard work, commitment and zeal.

Pakistan is lucky to have a great friend like China. The Chinese nation has given the lesson of hard work to Pakistan, and we have to transfer this lesson to our next generations because it is the only way to prosper in the world. The journey of Pakistan-China relations will continue, the CM concluded.

Original post:

CM Buzdar announces abolition of irrelevant amendments to Sugar Act - The Nation

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Budde speaks during a memorial service for George Floyd and other victims of racist violence and police brutality. Photo: Diocese of Indianapolis

[Episcopal News Service] Bishops, priests and laypeople from across The Episcopal Church gathered online on May 25 for a memorial service to mark the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. The multi-diocesan effort included musical performances, a message from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and a prayer of lament filmed in George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where then-police officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes on May 25, 2020.

The service honored the memory of Floyd as an individual, but also as one of many people of color who have been killed by police in the United States, and also to honor the national movement to end police brutality and systemic racism that his death accelerated.

When America saw that video taken by that dear 17-year-old child, when the world saw George Floyd murdered by those charged to protect and serve, something moved, Curry said in his sermon. Something changed. And while we do not know how it will unfold, people began to pray with their lips and with their legs.

The liturgy, designed by Missouri Bishop Deon Johnson, opened with statements from several other bishops, putting Floyds death in context and affirming the churchs ongoing commitment to racial justice.

Together we stand against the tide, said Colorado Bishop Kym Lucas. Because no matter what may come, no matter what the tide may bring, we are here, and we are far stronger united as one, caring for our neighbors in Christ.

Events like this ongoing viral pandemic and the pandemic of racism and violence which took the life of George Floyd and many others offer us more questions than answers, said Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry, but we gather to be close to each other, to be in community, to remember. We stand with each other and with our siblings who tragically continue to lose their lives in our communities, our nation, and around the world.

A slideshow of Episcopalians at Black Lives Matter protests including at St. Johns Church in Washington, D.C. accompanied a performance of Hes Got the Whole Word in His Hand by musicians from the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Lexington, Kentucky.

After a Scripture reading, Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya and the Rev. Robert Two Bulls, missioner for the Department of Indian Work and Multicultural Ministries in the Diocese of Minnesota, prayed a psalm of lament written by the Missouri bishop at the site of Floyds murder.

The Rev. Robert Two Bulls and the Rt. Rev. Craig Loya pray during the memorial service. Photo: Diocese of Indianapolis

How lonely sits our neighborhood, O God! they prayed. How we weep bitterly in the night! Silent tears have become our song. Gone too soon has become our lament.

The service was then silent for 9 minutes and 29 seconds the amount of time that Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyds neck. During the silence, a slideshow played that showed Floyds place in a long line of African American victims of racist violence and police brutality. Dozens of faces from recognizable names like Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor to lesser-known victims like Eleanor Bumpurs and Alonzo Ashley passed across the screen, punctuated by bells. The montage showed the sobering toll on African Americans that had been mounting long before Floyds murder.

Curry, drawing from Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in his sermon, commended Episcopalians for praying with your lips and with your feet by marching for change. He encouraged the church not to give up, even when the struggle seems fruitless or forgotten.

There will come a time when the worlds attention will go elsewhere, he said. There will come a time when there will be pushback and resistance. That is often the case. There will come a time when we will grow weak, and sometimes weary. Death after death. Shooting after shooting. Violence after violence. Nightmare after nightmare.

The job of Christians, he said, is changing this world from the nightmare it often is into the dream that God has intended, changing and transforming human lives and social institutions.

The abolition and civil rights movements took decades of work that often seemed hopeless, he recounted, sharing the story of how his grandfather marched with other sleeping car porters in the 1940s for fair wages, equal rights and an end to lynching. But the lynchings did not end; Emmett Tills murder in 1955 galvanized the public in a way similar to Floyds, he said. Tills murder inspired Rosa Parks to stand her ground on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

It is sometimes easy to despair and give up, Curry said. And while this is a normal and natural human emotion. It is not an option for us.

Standing at a memorial to Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager killed by police in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, Johnson ended the service with a gesture of hope.

The Rt. Rev. Deon Johnson speaks during the memorial service. Photo: Diocese of Indianapolis

A single light has the power to dispel even the longest shadow, he said, lighting a candle and sharing the flame with others gathered there. Standing in front of St. Johns Church in Washington, Bishop Mariann Budde did the same. Then other groups from dioceses and seminaries across the U.S. and Canada held up their candles on Zoom, showing the progression of the flame into the world.

As we share the light from these many flames, may these candles be symbols of our burning hope and our shining light, that we may act out of hope and compassion to mourn with those who grieve, Johnson said.

Egan Millard is an assistant editor and reporter for Episcopal News Service. He can be reached at emillard@episcopalchurch.org.

See original here:

At George Floyd memorial service, Episcopalians remember lives lost and recommit to 'stand against the tide' - Episcopal News Service

Support for capital punishment has declined in the U.S. to its lowest level in 50 years. In March, Virginia, formerly one of the staunchest supporters of the death penalty, became the 23rd state to abolish it.

But getting rid of it entirely promises to be an uphill struggle, says Marc Bookman, executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation. Bookman, whose nonprofit organization provides services for individuals on Death Row, explains why in his recently published book, A Descending Spiral a collection of 12 essays exploring the systemic, political and emotional barriers to full abolition.

In a chat with TCR, Bookman, who served in the Homicide Unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, discusses why the most draconian forms of punishment retain traction among many players in the U.S. justice system, why he believes things might change if prosecutors were held accountable for their actions at trial, and how capital punishment decisions are affected by systemic racism in the courts.

The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity.

The Crime Report: How did your experiences working in the justice system lead you to writing this book?

Marc Bookman: Ive always been a writer, but you know what brought me to write these essays was really my work. The one thing Im absolutely certain of is that if people knew the facts about the death penalty, they would think differently. Theres a quote from Hemingways The Sun Also Rises in which a character is asked how he went bankrupt. Two ways, he answers. Gradually, then suddenly. Thats capital punishment.

When you first get into it, you start to learn about all the problems with it slowly; but, after a while, it all just falls on your head like a stone. The problems become more and more apparent the more work you do. This book reflects that. I would start out writing an essay about a bad lawyer, but the essay would also quickly expose racism, or a prosecutor who hides evidence, or the courts that purposely overlook a problem with the case. And thats the amazing thing: any capital punishment case almost never has just one problem. In these cases, all of the problems tend to coalesce.

TCR: Your book points out that courts and judges will often override a jurys more lenient decision and push for capital punishment. What explains this dogged pursuit of the most punitive forms of justice?

MB: I think a desire for retribution is still a regrettable part of human nature. Why did we elect Donald Trump president? He said a lot of venal, vindictive and mean-spirited things, and yet he still got a significant percentage of the population to vote for him. However, Im also absolutely convinced that the courts, politicians, and prosecutors are all under the misperception that capital punishment is more popular than it really is. I think there are two explanations why courts go out of their way to sentence someone to death: Either the people involved are venal, or they feel that the public wants them to do this and that they may lose an election, or be frowned upon in their community if they dont.

TCR: Conversations about capital punishment often focus on the actions of police, attorneys, judges, and the lower courts. But your book reveals that even the Supreme Court often upholds or even flat-out ignores these cases where a persons life is on the line.

MB: There are common misconceptions that the law, as written, creates a revolving door where people commit horrible crimes and then walk out the front door because of a technicality. The reality is exactly the opposite. Some of our most regrettable laws, such as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (ADPA), are written so that judges can feel better about ignoring compelling evidence. And its the beginning of the road to fairness and justice that is the most important.

So, if a bad ruling or [bad] lawyering occurs at the beginning of a trialand it often doesADPA is designed to shield that bad behavior from scrutiny. And once a state court makes a bad decision based on bad evidence and information, then that decision is deferred through the whole process. So, we see federal courts saying this is a decision made by the state court, we owe a deference; and, therefore, the Act prevents us from doing anything in this case. ADPA is designed to give cover to judges that, frankly, want to screw our clients. Its one of the worst laws ever written and the technicalities are really designed to hurt defendants, not help them.

TCR: Your book also reveals that judges make decisions based on how they will affect their careers, often deciding cases one way or another only because theyre worried about losing their jobs.

MB: [Many polls on capital punishment ask people whether they are in favor of the death penalty] but thats the wrong question. The right question is: what do you feel is the appropriate punishment for someone who has been convicted of first-degree murder? The death penalty, life without parole and restitution to the victims, or life with parole and restitution to the victims? Thats the correct question because its the question jurors are faced with. It doesnt matter what a guy thinks when hes walking down the street, it matters what he thinks when hes imposing a sentence someone convicted of an death penalty-eligible crime.

When you ask that question, the answers come out to about 35 or 40 percent in favor of the death penalty, 35 or 50 percent in favor of life without parole and restitution to the victims, and the rest is life in favor of the possibility of parole and restitution. And once judges and politicians realize that the death penalty is not nearly as popular as they think it is, they wont feel compelled to act in a fearful way to support the death penalty and they wont feel that theyre going to lose the next election. The death penalty is simply not the trigger that it used to be. And the sooner we can persuade politicians and judges that they can do whats right, and not what is necessary to keep their jobs, then the better off well be in terms of justice.

TCR: How does politics influence the conversation?

MB: Politics is a broad word. I think that until relatively recently the public might have thought that the U.S. Supreme Court was getting its answers from law books. In other words, they might have thought the answer is there somewhere, well go and find the case that addresses this point of law, and then well write an opinion and that point of law will be explicated, and well know the answer.

What we now know, and what people like me and many others have known for years, is that the answer does not lie in the law books. It lies in, for lack of a better word and relying on the broadest use of the word, politics. Which is that people bring their thoughts, background, and experience to their decision making. W.B. Yeats said, How can we know the dancer from the dance? You cant separate politics from legal decisions, because the answer doesnt lie in the law books; it lies in what the court thinks is the right answer. The decision on whether someone should live or die is the only moral decision that we make in the justice system; so, how do you separate out a persons individual politics from that decision? I dont think you can.

TCR: Your book exposes the countless number of circumstances that can affect the course of a death penalty case. Among them are the failings of prosecutors and defense attorneys. How do we improve their accountability?

MB: Let me deal with prosecutors first. The book describes a number of circumstances where prosecutors intentionally hid evidence or intentionally didnt turn over exculpatory evidence. And if we catch someone intentionally hiding evidence, and we prosecute that person for obstruction of justice, I guarantee you fewer prosecutors are going to hide evidence. How do we deter theft? We prosecute it. How do we deter any crime? We prosecute it.

When a prosecutor is intentionally hiding evidence, thats a crime. At the very least its obstruction of justice, and it may be more than that. Theres an essay in the book, where three police officers take the Fifth when confronted with the errors in their own investigation. Nothing happened to them. How do we expect to stop misbehavior by the prosecution or the police if were not going to prosecute them when they are actually seeking refuge in the Bill of Rights? Prosecute a couple of them, and theyll stop doing it.

Defense attorneys are a different issue. If a defense attorney intentionally undermines the case, thats a crime as well, but you dont see that. What you do see is incredibly sloppy behavior. The answer isnt to disbar them or force them to testify; or punish them. Its to stop giving them more cases and have them practice some other kind of law. There has to be a merit-based scrutiny of defense attorneys handling capital cases.

TCR: Why do you think there is a disconnect between the understanding and acceptance of scientific evidence by the courts, especially when it comes to things like mental illness?

MB: Fifty years from now were going to look back at our understanding of the brain, and be appalled. When you talk about scientific evidence, the first problem is that the courts consider that kind of science soft. Severe mental illness is seen as an excuse. Its not like cancer, its not like a stroke, its not like heart disease. But plenty of people know right now that severe mental illness is just as profound, just as provable, and just as able to be assessed as any of those issues. We have to overcome this prejudice, the idea that (mental illness) is some kind of an excuse for a person who is just evil. Anybody that does what I do doesnt believe in evil. Thats naive, black-and-white nonsense, and its just wrong.

TCR: When it comes to the problem of understanding evidence in the courts, please explain the role of Brady evidence and the potential for biased interpretation?

MB: One of the biggest ironies in criminal justice is that the people prosecuting the case are the same people that decide what evidence should be provided to the defense. The Brady Rule requires that exculpatory evidence be turned over to the defense. Ideally there would be some neutral body that was looking over the evidence and making a decision on what should be turned over and what shouldnt or doesnt have to be turned over. In a world where we really want to make sure were not making mistakes, where we really want to make sure every defendant has a fair shot, we would have a totally open file policy and the defense would get everything.

But were not living in an ideal world. The prosecution has to decide what gets turned over and what doesnt get turned over, but of course they have the motivation to win and, presumably, believe their case is a strong case. So what seems significant to me may not seem significant to them. But a huge irony in our practice is that the wolves guard the henhouse.

TCR: One essay in your book focuses on how a judges racism affects his decisions. Please discuss the role of race in capital punishment.

MB: Justice Lewis Powell, late in his life, said the one decision he really regretted the most was McCleskey v. Kemp. Its important that he said that. McCleskey demonstrated pretty clearly that theres an incredible racial bias that permeates our justice system. That cannot come as a surprise to any person whos paying attention. And if we find racial discrimination in these capital cases, whats to say that the same discrimination doesnt permeate the rest of the cases that are not capital? And of course it does. Its silly to think that we have racial discrimination in capital cases but we dont have them in forgery cases or in robbery cases.

Justice William Brennan once said theres a fear of too much justice. He meant that (judges) were afraid to be honest about what the evidence shows, because of the consequences of that honesty. We have to deal with the fact that our society still has an endemic racial discrimination problem. The story of the racist judge youre referring to is not the only one. In Pennsylvania. we had a scandal recently that rocked the judiciary. Two justices on the (state) Supreme Court had to resign because they were passing around racist, pornographic and misogynistic emails between the court, the prosecution and a couple of defense attorneys.

This problem is systemic and you can find problems like it in almost every case. McCleskey v. Kemp proves that we basically looked the other way at pretty clear evidence of race discrimination then and were still looking the other way now.

TCR: Along with discrimination, another systemic problem that you discuss is the issue of confessions.

MB: False confessions are so counterintuitive to most of us. Who in Gods name thinks that if they confessed to a horrible crime, they can then just go home? Theres a recognition, even by our Supreme Court, that lower-functioning people are more likely to confess. Thats one of the reasons the courts decided you cant seek the death penalty against the intellectually disabled. Another reason, aside from moral ones, is that they are more likely to get caught up in the criminal justice system.

The story dealing with this in the book is pretty amazing. Not only did two people confess, but one of them took a deal for 15 years in prison and then testified against the other one. There was no doubt that both were clearly innocent, and they were later released from prison because of their innocence. But think about the power of false confessions when a low-functioning guy, who was probably intellectually disabled, was actually able to testify to a crime that he didnt commit. Then look at the list of DNA exonerations, where we found out who the right person was by DNA.

A significant percentage of exonerees had actually confessed to the original crime, and a lot of these false confessions are caused by the police. In the story described in the book, the police came to the conclusion that the individuals they arrested were guilty after firstg threatening them with the death penalty. The method of interrogation used by the police is essentially designed to coerce confessions. And the biggest problem with false confessions is that a jury cannot imagine somebody falsely confessing. And the eleven always pressure the one who can.

TCR: At the end of the book, you say that change is coming, albeit slowly. Where do you see this change occurring and why are you optimistic for the future?

MB: Im hopeful because I can look at the data and see that sentences are going down and executions are going down. And the explanation for that is the more people know, the less they are enamored of capital punishment. The more we know that lawyers screw up, that people falsely confess, that juries make mistakes, that race discrimination has permeated our justice system, the more all those things come into the publics view and the less enamored they become. The public and jurors are getting more knowledgeable.

Thats the main reason I wanted this book to come out, because I think that the more people read about these things the less theyre going to like capital punishment as a public policy.

Its a truly failed public policy.

I write that its going to come to a slow grinding halt because something like the Trump administration comes along and executes 13 people in seven months. Its disgraceful. But, the more we recognize that we have made a lot of mistakes like this, and that its wrong, then the more progressive prosecutors get elected and the more likely it becomes that were going to end capital punishment. And states are regularly getting rid of it, if only for the fact that were just throwing money away on a failed policy. So changes are around the corner; it just depends on how far away we perceive that corner to be.

Isidoro Rodriguez is editor of TCRs Justice Digest.

More:

Why the Death Penalty Lingers On in America - Crime Report

Around 30 people painted canvases with their ideas around abolition outside of Evanston Police Department on Sunday in an effort to build community as part of Evanston Fight for Black Lives third Reclaim the Block series.

Amalia Loiseau, a University of Illinois student and an organizer, said the goal of the event was to create a safe space for community members.

With the citys Black population declining, Loiseau said it is imperative to improve the quality of life of Black residents. Loiseau sees EFBLs Reclaim the Block events as an opportunity to take back power for the people and create a strong community.

As a member of the Black community in Evanston, we do events to uplift ourselves. It is really important to build community, Loiseau said. People are seeing that the police are given so much money to cause so much harm. Even simple things like this can help. Having open conversations can help with healing.

Omar Salem, an Evanston resident of 10 years, said he wants his children to know what Evanston youth activists are fighting for. He appreciated how family friendly Sundays event was, and his daughter, Sydney, immersed herself in the painting activity.

Organizer Sarah Bogan said considering that Evanstons population is around 74,000, she wishes more people had showed up. Given the high level of support among college-aged individuals, however, Bogan said she expects turnout will be greater as the summer progresses and students return home.

A big point is making a point to this department that we are not going anywhere, Bogan said. There is so much love that goes into this work and community building is the whole point of what we are doing.

Resident Liz Kenney, a member of Quaker congregation Evanston Friends Meeting, said she was impressed by the youths work and their engagement in creative non-violence and peace, which are central Quaker values, she said.

As a White woman, Kenney acknowledged her privilege in interacting with the police.

The police are designed to keep me safe. And they do. Like a lot of White people in this country, I am reckoning with that, Kenney said. We cant wait to take action. Its a moral imperative.

For Bogan, Sunday was an opportunity to share a community-based side of the movement different from standing in the streets and protesting. Particularly, she said creating spaces for people of color stands out as an important objective of the Sunday Reclaim the Block parties.

Im passionate because these are my people and we should all have the same rights and feel like we deserve to be in spaces just as much as other people, Bogan said.

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @JackAustinNews

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See the original post here:

Evanston Fight for Black Lives hosts third Reclaim the Block event - Daily Northwestern

A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officer opens the gate for an incarcerated person who is leaving the exercise yard at San Quentin State Prison's death row on August 15, 2016, in San Quentin, California.Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

People end up in prison for a reason, but its not the reason that were fed by all of these cop shows, says Victoria Law. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes talks with journalist Victoria Law about prisons, why they dont work, and what even well-meaning people tend to get wrong about incarceration.

Music by Son Monarcas

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. Im your host, Kelly Hayes. As our regular listeners know, the subject of prison abolition comes up pretty frequently on this show, because, in addition to being a writer and organizer, I am a prison abolitionist. And I know this is a tough topic, for a lot of people, who may agree with me about a whole lot of other things. Because this society presents us with a lot of horrifying problems, and very few solutions. So when we talk about defunding the police, or abolishing prisons, some people feel like were talking about taking away the only recourse they have, in a society that subjects them to a lot of harm.

Thats why I think its important to, first and foremost, remember that, as Ruthie Gilmore tells us, Abolition is about presence, not absence. Its about demanding and creating structures and supports that would actually allow us to create safety, and prevent harm from happening, rather than grasping for punitive solutions after tragedies have already occurred. But I also think its important to get honest about what prisons and policing really are, and how they work. In a recent episode called You Cannot Divorce Murder From Policing, I talked with Alex Vitale about the history and current state of policing, and I encourage everyone to check out that episode if they havent yet. In todays episode, I talk with author and journalist Victoria Law about prisons, why they dont work, and what even well-meaning people tend to get wrong about incarceration. Regardless of how you feel about prisons or prison abolition, I think we all need to reckon with the realities of a system that is devouring millions of people as we speak. Because none of us are exempt from the harms being done or reinforced, and none of us are safe, so long as safety is mythologized on these terms.

[musical interlude]

KH: Todays guest is Victoria Law. Victoria is a freelance journalist and author whose most recent book Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration dispels popular beliefs about prisons, violence, and safety. She is also a Truthout contributor and co-author of the book, Prison by Any Other Name. Victoria Law, welcome to the show.

Victoria Law: Thanks so much for having me Kelly, and thank you so much for all of these issues you cover.

KH: Im grateful for the chance to have these conversations. So how are you doing today, amid all the things?

VL: Im doing okay. I mean, in the midst of a pandemic and the twin pandemics of white supremacy and the coronavirus, I am doing as okay as can be. Im not imprisoned. I dont have COVID. I think thats okay.

KH: Well, I am so glad you could be here. Because I really think Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration is one of the most important books Ive read in a really long time, and Im definitely not alone in that assessment. I know Mariame Kaba has called it an essential read, both for people who are new to this subject, and for those of us who are already organizing against the prison industrial complex. Angela Davis has also called the book an important tool that could enable precisely the kind of understanding we need in this moment.

I felt similarly about Prison by Any Other Name, which you co-wrote with my dear friend, and Truthouts editor-in-chief, Maya Schenwar. Ive heard you say that you think the two books compliment each other, and that you were actually working on them simultaneously. Can you say a bit about how the books serve as complementary resources and who you hope will read them?

VL: Sure. So I see prisons my Prison by Any Other Name, which Maya and I actually envisioned back in 2015 when Obama was president, and we were looking at bipartisan criminal justice reform and the ideas of kinder, gentler forms of surveillance and control, that didnt necessarily address root causes of imprisonment and still entrenched the idea that prisons or some form of confinement were necessary for some people. We wrote that with the idea that people who already understood that mass incarceration was a problem, that it was a gigantic 2.2 million person problem, and that it needed to be eradicated wouldnt fall for solutions that simply proposed building different sorts of prisons with the same underlying carceral logics.

Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration is geared more towards people who are new to prison issues, might be coming into it especially this past year from movements and mobilizations to defund the police, understanding that policing and prisons are related forms of state violence, but may not necessarily know very much about prisons and thus are susceptible to some of the most pernicious and most pervasive myths about mass incarceration.

And as Maya and I noted frequently in Prison by Any Other Name, if you dont understand what causes mass incarceration, and you fall for some of these myths that point the finger at some entity that is perhaps a parasite, but not a primary driver of mass incarceration, youre going to fall for solutions that dont actually solve underlying causes of harm, violence, or this idea that we need prisons to keep us safer. And instead might fall for the more cosmetic changes that instead entrench prisons in other ways in our lives in our communities.

KH: Well, I cant stress enough that I hope everyone will pick up both of these books. In the opening of Prisons Make Us Safer, you offer up some pretty disturbing numbers. The United States has less than 5 percent of the worlds population, but 25 percent of its prison population. The U.S. had 2.3 million people in cages, as of 2019, and 6.7 million people whose movements were under some form of surveillance or control, such as house arrest, electronic monitoring, parole, or probation. 4.9 million people cycle through our nations jails each year, and the majority of those people have not been convicted of a crime. And on any given day, 2.7 million children have a parent in prison.

As Ive discussed on the show in the past, conditions inside U.S. prisons are so abhorrent, that each year spent in a U.S. prison takes two years off a persons life expectancy. And with over 2 million people incarcerated, prisons have shortened the overall U.S. life expectancy by almost two years.

So were talking about a grotesque system of torture and death-making, and a public health crisis, that most people have been conditioned not to think about. But what I hear most often, when I do confront people with facts or figures about how horrific prison conditions really are, is that people wind up there for a reason. And weve been trained by cop shows and popular, punitive ideas about justice and revenge to accept that vague notion of a reason as sufficient cause to write off whatever happens to people within those walls. But I really want to take a moment and dig into why we tolerate something so grotesque, that involves so many harms and indignities, that people would otherwise consider outside their values.

As you name in your book, the main arguments in support of incarceration are deterrence, incapacitation, and justice for victims. Can you say just a bit about why these arguments dont hold up?

VL: Yes. I mean, what we see when we have these three arguments. Well first, Im going to back up a minute. I want to address your point that people say, Well, people end up in prison for a reason or for reasons. And yes they do, but its not the reason that were fed by all of these cop shows, law and order shows, politicians, and media hype that push for stricter and harsher penalties. People end up in prison because our society does not have a robust safety net. We are a society that is still plagued with racism and white supremacy. With misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and the unwillingness to provide basic resources to people living in this country. And instead of providing those resources, imprisonment in all of its forms seeks to sweep these problems under the rug and out of public view.

So yes, people end up in prison for a reason. But it is not necessarily a reason of personal responsibility. It is a reason of a collective failure, over decades, and decades, and decades, to provide for people. And it is our societal failure to uproot things like white supremacy and misogyny that this country was actually built on. And instead, strengthen ways in which people can be safe in their homes, among their families, and in their communities. So looking at prisons as either deterrence, incapacitation, or justice for victims feeds into this myth that prisons provide this sense of safety for people.

But if youre listeners think back to this idea of deterrence, and they think back to their past week and anyone who irritated them or annoyed them when they were going about their daily lives, how often did they respond to that person with violence or harm? If somebody cut you off in traffic, did you get out and punch them in the face? If somebody grabbed the roll of toilet paper that you were looking for or cut you in line at the supermarket, did you respond by slamming your shopping cart into their legs? If somebody cat called you on the street, did you turn around and take your meat cleaver out of your purse and smack them upside the head?

And if you did none of these things, did you refrain from doing this because you were afraid of the threat of arrest and imprisonment? Or did you recognize that this person was irritating, or annoying, or upsetting, and then choose either a different response or no response at all? Not because you are afraid that you might get arrested or you might be facing jail time, but because you recognize that this was actually not a way that you wanted to handle the situation.

And there have been studies that show that people dont think about prison or prison time when they are committing acts that are illegal, whether they be criminalized acts or acts of harm and violence. If they think about prison, its some far away notion that might or might not happen. But very few, if any people are deterred from causing harm and violence because of the threat of imprisonment.

Because if this were the case, given the gigantic number of people behind bars or under some sort of carceral supervision, everybody in the United States should be deterred by this giant looming threat of imprisonment hanging over their heads. And instead, we see that we are not the safest country. There are acts of violence happening on a daily basis. People are not deterred by this threat of arrest and imprisonment, despite all of the law and order shows, the cop shows, the draconian sentences, the increases in policing in urban areas. This has not deterred individuals from engaging in criminalized actions, including harm and violence.

When we think about incapacitation, and justice for victims, we have to remember that according to the Department of Justices own findings, over half of violent crimes go unreported each year. So over 50 percent of people who have been harmed by violence do not report it to the legal system. So people are not seeking justice or safety from the system in the first place. And from there, even fewer people are actually arrested. So if you have, say 46 percent of people who have been harmed reporting to the police, fewer people are arrested. And then from there, even fewer are referred to for prosecution, and even fewer are actually convicted and sent to prison.

So prison doesnt incapacitate people who cause harm and violence by and large. What were seeing is that it incapacitates some people who happen to be reported, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. And then they are sent to prison.

And there, they often are sent into a chaotic, violent, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and homophobic environment that does nothing to address the root causes of why they harmed somebody else, or why they engaged in violent behavior, or why they had to engage in criminalized behavior if there was not somebody who was directly harmed by their actions.

And again, what we see over, and over, and over is that the criminal legal system does not provide these kinds of resources either to the person who engaged in the harm or to the person who was harmed, who might need a plethora of resources in order to begin to recover, and heal, and rebuild their lives. The criminal legal system is not built to offer, say mental health counseling, or medical care, or help with medical bills, or time off from work so that they can begin to heal. Or childcare, or any other sorts of supports that people need after they have experienced violence and harm.

KH: I know that some people believe that prisons are sites of potential reform. But most of the people I grew up around, and most of the people I encounter in the world, dont really have any illusions about prisons being sites of reformation. Some of them argue that prisons are a deterrent. But mostly, they believe punishment is a necessary end in itself. I know I walked around for most of my life believing that, because we really are conditioned by this society to conflate satisfaction with justice. And that conflation is a pretty easy con. Most people want to be told that their impulses are correct. And when we are harmed, most of us, reflexively, want some kind of revenge. We dont like to call it that, so we may dress that impulse up linguistically, in a variety of ways some of them quite lofty but fundamentally, it is a completely human impulse to want to see the people who harm us hurt or suffer. Its understandable. But what this system does, is to tell us, Yes, you are right to want that. And that if this person does suffer, then justice has been done.

And that line of thinking really lets the system and the rest of society off the hook. Because if all that really needs to happen for us to arrive at justice is for that person to suffer, we dont really have to address the inequality that youve spoken of, or the cycles of violence, or the lack of healthcare, or the destruction of the social safety net, or the lack of positive socialization or support that so many people are experiencing. Confronting those things would often involve a radical reorientation of the way society works. And the criminal system is about maintaining the norms, order and hierarchy of a grossly unequal society. Its not about our personal safety, or personal reckonings with injustice. Its about maintaining our cooperation with the very system that generates the harms we experience.

So rather than saying, What happened here should be unthinkable, what would we need to change to keep it from happening again? The system tells us that if the person is punished, we should experience satisfaction and peace, and feel assured that the world is safer. But of course, the system doesnt really offer that either. It offers the idea of that. Because most people who experience harm, as you say, dont even bother to engage with the system. And those that do rarely get any satisfaction from that engagement. Can you say a bit about the mythology of justice in the U.S. system and how it compares to how victims and survivors actually experience the system?

VL: Yes. So we have this myth that justice equals retribution. And to paraphrase Mariame Kaba, a long time prison abolitionist and an organizer against gender violence, prison abolition is not about not having consequences. But in our society, we equate punishment with consequences. So people should face consequences for actions that they take, whether they be large or small. I mean, think about how many times, if you live in a household with somebody, you try to hold them accountable for things like, Hey, you said you were going to do the dishes and you didnt. Or, Hey, please dont leave your dirty socks all over the living room. So small actions like this to larger actions like, Hey, you need to be responsible and there needs to be consequences for the fact that youve harmed somebody.

But because we live in a punitive society and a society that has conditioned us to expect that punishment is a logical consequence, we have this idea that people need to suffer. And they need to be put into places that are, to quote Mariame Kaba, Somewhere else away from us. And that these places must be hellholes. If theyre violent, if theyre chaotic, if there are no rehabilitative opportunities, if their relationships with their family members are destroyed, if their communities are devastated by having so many people pulled out, well, that is because of their individual actions. And it lets society off the hook for the large systemic failures of why we have income inequality. Why do women make so much less money than men? Why do people of color make so much less money than white people? Why do women of color make so much less money than their white counterparts? Why do police profile? Why are communities that are often income communities of color that are devastated by violence even further devastated by police violence instead of having money being put into resources that those communities need to address violence and to stop economic, and gender, and racial inequalities?

So prisons obviously dont solve any of this. Prisons are a solution to punish people for being part of systemic societal failures. And for victims, what this often looks like is if they decide to report to police, if they go to the system in the first place, they have to tell their story over and over to police officers, and later to prosecutors, in a way that is believable and credible. And we have to remember that not every person is seen as a victim. So when Black men are killed, the system takes their deaths less seriously than it does for their white counterparts. We see this also with people who are sexually assaulted, over three quarters of whom do not report to the police in the first place.

And then if the victims case goes to court, they are called to testify in front of a grand jury, which is a panel of total strangers who are impassive. And they have to tell their story in a way, again, that is believable to this panel of strangers who hear many, many cases in one day. So by this point, everybodys mind is just blurred into horror story, after horror story, after horror story. And then if their case goes to trial, they must then tell the story again in a courtroom to a jury in a way that is believable and stands up against any personal attacks on the defense.

And then at the end of this, if the person who harmed them is convicted, theyre able to come to court and give a victim impact statement. But for people who dont want there to be draconian penalties, I talk about the one mother whose son was accidentally killed. Her 17 year old son was accidentally killed by his friend who was also 17 years old. She did not want her sons friend to go to prison for a long period of time. But the district attorney and the courts never notified her about the sentencing. She had no opportunity to go and give a victim impact statement that said, My son is gone. Let us not wreck another 17 year olds life by sending him away to prison for a long period of time. But she never had a chance to do that. And she only found out later that her sons friend got some absurdly long sentence because the jury said, Okay, you are convicted of murder. And the judge said, Okay, here are the sentencing guidelines. And nobody asked her what she wanted.

Not all victims want the person who harmed them or their loved ones to go away for long periods of time. This is why we often see that family violence, particularly domestic violence and violence against children is underreported, because they dont want to see their family member or loved one spending long periods of time in some hellish prison. They simply want that person to stop hurting them. And that is not what the current policing in prison system can provide.

KH: I also want to talk a bit about private prisons. In 2019, Maya Schenwar and I co-wrote a piece called The Problem With Child Detention Isnt That Its Private. Its That It Exists. And we got a lot of pushback from people who I think mostly had not read the piece, about how private prisons were a good place to start. And that obviously people insisted, if you removed the profit motive, there would be fewer children imprisoned and better conditions for incarcerated children.

In your book, you wrote the best breakdown Ive seen of why thats just not the case, really shattering the myth that we would somehow be rescuing people by ending private prisons. And also, the myth that taking them on is even the best place to start. Could you say a bit about that?

VL: Yes. So what we have to remember is that people are sent to prisons as punishment. And private prisons for the criminal legal system make up 8 to 9 percent of the total prison population. They make up 73 percent of immigration detention, which is a different structure with many of the same similarities of imprisonment the lack of freedom, the violence, the chaos, the brutality, etc.

But when were talking about mass incarceration or immigrant detention, we have to think of private prison corporations as parasites in the same way that we think of the companies that run the telephone systems, or the companies that provide the uniforms, or the companies that sell mass amounts of soap and gruel and whatever else. As parasites that are making money off of mass incarceration. There is a place to make a buck, and they are going to figure out a way to do so.

However, what we have seen is that in places where private prisons are closed, this does not result in people being released. So when Obamas Justice Department issued a memo towards the end of his presidency stating that they were going to allow their contracts with private prison companies to phase out and they would not renew them, the order did not come with an accompanying memo that said, And for the X thousands of people who are currently held in private prisons, were going to arrange for them to go home. So they were not going to be released, as a result of private prison closures, they were going to be shuffled into government run prisons, which are just as shoddy, which are just as violent, chaotic, and ill-run. With the only difference being that there was not a giant corporation being paid a fixed amount per body per day for caging them.

We see the same thing in states where some states that have rescinded or stopped using private prisons contracts have not seen a decrease in their prison population. Instead, what they are seeing is they just shuffle people from private prisons to their government run prisons.

Last year, Oklahoma ended its contract with a private prison corporation to close one of its larger private prisons as a cost saving measure. But what they did not do as a cost-saving measure was have a large-scale release of people who were being held in that private prison, or a large-scale release of a corresponding number of people being held in that private prison. Instead, those people were shuffled into the already overcrowded state run prisons in Oklahoma to continue serving their time.

So what we see is that when private prison corporations, or when private prisons are closed, or when divestment strategies happen, private prisons themselves might close, but people inside are not freed. And furthermore, these corporations, which are built to make a buck, simply reshuffle and figure out new ways to profit. So we see groups like GEO Group, which is one of the largest private prison corporations, going into the business of halfway houses. We see them going into drug rehab. We see them buying up electronic monitoring company BI Incorporated to be able to continue their profit. But they are not the drivers of mass incarceration. We have to remember that two of the largest private prison corporations started in the mid 1980s, as prison population started to soar with this war on crime, war on drugs, tough on crime, just say no policies were happening, and states were really enacting harsher and harsher punishments, and corporations saw a way to make a buck.

I think of historian Elizabeth Hinton who talks about how Lyndon B. Johnson introduced both the war on poverty and the war on crime. And the war on crime won out. And thats why we dont have all of these structures to eradicate poverty because were so busy trying to lock people up.

But if the war on poverty had won out, some of these same corporations mightve evolved as corporations to make a buck off of efforts to eradicate poverty. So it is not necessarily that they are driving these policies. They may lobby. They may give political donations. But we also have to remember that the majority of prisons are government run prisons with government workers, who are in unions, who have a lot more political power, a lot more clout, donate far more money to political candidates, and offer to provide votes for these political candidates as well.

So private prison corporations are this sort of parasite that if we focus all of our attention on getting rid of them, we still dont solve the problem of mass incarceration. We get rid of a parasite. Great. You dont get to feed off of caging X number of people, whatever 9 percent of 2.2 million is. But this doesnt mean that people get to go home at the end of the day. And people should remember that.

KH: Another misconception you address in your book is the idea that prison slavery drives mass incarceration. You write that fewer than half of the 2.3 million people who are locked up in the U.S. work while theyre incarcerated, and less than 1 percent of those people work for private corporations. So why does the myth that slave labor is a driving force behind the prison system persist?

VL: I think we see this as a holdover from the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery in southern slave holding states with the exception of somebody who was convicted of a crime. And in the South, lawmakers seized on this exception. Law enforcers seized on this exception to be able to basically re-enslave the newly freed Black population and send them back to work in fields, in mines, in other types of hard, grueling labor. But it was a way to deprive them of their freedom once again.

Fast forward to the 1980s, and 1990s, and 2000s, and even today. We have large numbers of people who are in prison who remain idle. If prisons were about profit, every one of those 2.2 million people in prison would be put to work doing something. Instead, we have something like between 80,000 to 100,000 people in solitary confinement, which means that they are locked into their cells 23 and a half to 24 hours a day with absolutely nothing to do.

For example in Texas, there are large numbers of people in whats called administrative segregation, which is their fancy term for being locked in your cell 23 and a half to 24 hours a day. They are not being put to work in the fields, where Texas prisoners are often required to work, and plant food, and harvest food for people inside the prison. They are not being put to work in the braille industry where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice contracts with these textbook companies to translate books into braille. And people in prison are not being paid for this, but TDCJ is.

But if profit was the sole motivation, then you would not have well-educated people who are probably going to be very good at translating books into braille languishing in solitary confinement, or languishing in places where they are idle and unable to work.

Instead, what we see is work is often used as a control mechanism. It is a control mechanism if somebody has a job that pays them a better wage and allows them to buy some things. And we also see it as a way for prisons to offset their own costs. So if you have people, imprisoned people mopping the floors, scrubbing the toilets, cutting other peoples hair, running errands for the prison warden, working in these fields, that is work that you do not have to pay an outside person whatever the minimum wage is in the state or county that you were in to do, but it does not necessarily offset the gigantic costs of 25,000, 30,000, 45,000, $55,000 per prisoner per year that the state incurs. So it is not an offset.

I mean, in the outside world, saying that we would spend $55,000 for somebody to sit in their house all day, everybody would decry this as welfare queen, welfare, lazy, something, something, something. We would say no, you cannot pay $55,000 for a person to sit in their house and do nothing.

But we do this all the time with imprisonment. We see that very few people are employed. Even fewer are employed by private prison corporations. And instead, prison systems spend an enormous amount of money keeping hundreds of thousands of people just sitting all day doing absolutely nothing.

KH: I want to talk a bit about sex offender registries. In your book, you take on the myth that sex offender registries are necessary to keep children safe. I feel like this is a tough one for a lot of people, because the desire to hang on to these registries comes from a very emotional place. Parents and other people who love children are afraid for the young people in their lives, and many dont want to give up anything that they think could offer even the smallest chance of insulating young people from violence. We also have a lot of contempt in our society for people convicted of anything construed of as a sex crime. And I think thats both the product of personal pain and resentment, sometimes stemming from our own experiences, and also from the collective pain and trauma that some cases have instilled in us as a society which is why these laws are often named after victims, who we would like to believe these laws would have saved. Those feelings are reinforced by cop shows like Law and Order SVU that position police and prisons as our best protection against monstrously depraved people, who are depicted as lurking around every corner.

But one in four girls and at least one in six boys are sexually abused in the U.S. before their 18th birthday, as you wrote in your book. And prisons and sex offender registries are not protecting children from those outcomes. Can you say a bit about these registries and how they actually function, and why they dont keep us safe?

VL: Sure. So we have to remember that sex offender registries like arrest and like prosecution and imprisonment come after harm has occurred, and only come if the harm is reported. So we have to remember that this statistic that you just read, one in four girls and one in six boys nationally are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. And of those, very few report to the authorities that this has happened. We have to also remember that 93 percent of child sexual abuse happens at the hands of family members or acquaintances, not strangers. So we are fed this idea that sex offender registries deal with the stranger in a white van whos going to pop out of their van, and grab your kid, and do who knows what with your child. And in reality, child sexual abuse is more likely to happen at the hands of a family member, a community member, a trusted person, or an acquaintance.

And we also have to remember that child sexual abuse has a very low percentage of reporting. So of every 100 incidents of child sexual abuse, only 10 to 18 instances are reported to the authorities. And from there, the number gets significantly and terrifyingly lower. If we think that police, and prisons, and sex offender registries keep children safe. Of those 10 to 18, only six people who have committed harm go to trial. And only three are convicted. And they are convicted of something, not necessarily of hurting a child or children. But they might plead guilty to something else in order to avoid being labeled a sex offender.

So A, the sex offender registry does nothing to prevent sexual harm and sexual abuse, because it happens after the fact. Also policing and prisons do not keep children safe, because it happens after the fact. But what this does do is it vilifies people who harm children as depraved monsters. And it makes it harder for us to identify and recognize people who are exhibiting warning signs as people we should perhaps look out for.

So nobody wants to think that their grandfather, or their great uncle, or their aunt, or their cousin, or their neighbor, or their little league coach, or their music teacher or whoever, or their brother or their sister might be somebody who will harm children. Because in our minds, people who harm children are these depraved monsters. And they must have horns, and goblin fangs, and something else. And they could never be the beloved people in our community.

And when we fail to recognize these warning signs, we fail to act to prevent them. So what are the warning signs that could have prevented this from escalating in the first place? So similarly, what are the warning signs if you see somebody that is behaving in a way that leads you to believe that they may not be safe to be around children?

So when we fail to recognize these warning signs, we fail to do things that could either support that person in getting help before they harm somebody or before they continue to harm somebody. And instead, what we do is we turn a blind eye and were like, Thats Desmond. Desmond is great. He might be kind of weird, but I know that Ive known him since we were both six years old. And I know that he would never harm anybody. As opposed to saying, Hey Desmonds, lets talk. Lets try to figure this out. Lets look for resources together. And it also keeps people who are in criminalization, keeps people who are struggling with impulses or ideas about hurting children from voluntarily seeking help, because they are afraid of being criminalized, locked up, and put on the sex offender registry.

In addition, people are put on the sex offender registry with no way to get off and no support to help keep them from hurting somebody else again. Instead youre given a long list of what you cannot do. You cannot live near a school. You cannot live near a daycare. You cannot live with your sister, because shes got three minor children. You cannot get a job here because you might be violating X, Y, or Z. You cannot live in this place because it is near school, daycare, children. You might have to be cut off from what little support system you might still have that might be able to hold you if you feel like you are struggling.

And there have been numerous studies that show that people who commit child sexual abuse are more likely to commit violence again when theyre without their support system, when they are stressed, when theyre feeling isolated, than when they are in a system that tries to hold them responsible and accountable, however imperfectly that might be. And I say however imperfectly, because what we know again, and again, and again, is that the creation of the sex offender registry has not resulted in larger numbers of children being safe. We have more than 900,000 people on the National Sex Offender Registry right now. That is a number that is greater than the entire population of Vermont. Yet we are not seeing an increase in safety for children. The creation of the sex offender registry did not stop Larry Nassar, the doctor who was arrested and imprisoned for sexually assaulting numerous child gymnast throughout his career, from doing what he did.

It did not allow anybody to recognize that this nice doctor that treated so many gymnasts might have a problem and might require intervention. Instead, what happened is that countless young people were subjected to child sexual abuse at his hands were afraid to come out and say something about him. Or if they did, their complaints were not taken seriously because he did not fit this idea that people who harm children are depraved monsters, and somehow we can spot them a mile away.

KH: I absolutely agree, and I also want to name that these registries, of course, reach far beyond the bounds of child sexual abuse, and beyond crimes like rape. As many people know by now, there are states where people can wind up on these registries for things like public urination, or taking a naked photo of yourself, if youre a teenager, or even being a client of a sex worker, and I want to acknowledge that there are people whose lives are being destroyed by these registries over those things too. Because when we create mechanisms of surveillance and control like this, their reach will always creep outward, and ensnare people who are not the supposed targets of the legislation. But, to avoid falling into a reform trap, where people think we just need to tweak who gets registered, its really crucial to name, as Victoria has here, that even in cases where people have committed acts of sexual harm that deeply disturb us, these registries are not preventing those harms from happening and they are not making anyone safer. They really do cause nothing but harm.

I want to circle back, for a moment, to Prison by Any Other Name, and the sort of creeping extensions of the carceral system that we are witnessing. Because people often think of incarceration, and that kind of surveillance and control as happening somewhere far away, or, at least, removed from their existence. But as you and Maya Schenwar wrote in Prison by Any Other Name, the prison nation really is extending into so many areas of our lives. As society fails more and more of us, it becomes increasingly important for the system to depict us as failures, who have to be surveilled, punished and controlled, because it cant be society that has to change. It has to be us, who are lacking and failing, and need to be whipped into a better state of cooperation with it. So we see escalations of the carceral management of people, in schools, at work, in healthcare, and in family regulation systems, like DCFS [Department of Children and Family Services]. And, of course, we also see the outsourcing of incarceration into peoples homes. Can you say a bit about how the prison industrial complex is presently extending its reach?

VL: Yes. I mean, what we see is we see the prison industrial complex creeping into our lives in several different ways. First, we see the expansion of prison-like solutions often posited as alternatives to incarceration.

One of the most popular is electronic monitoring, which is when somebody is shackled with a global positioning system device, or a GPS device, which tracks their every movement. And electronic monitoring is almost always accompanied by home confinement, which means you are locked in your house. Well youre not physically locked. You are told to say in your house. And if you want to leave your house, you must have prior approval from the authorities. That authority can be the Sheriffs office, the electronic monitoring company, a probation officer, a parole officer. The authority varies, but the result is the same. If you walk out of your house, even in an emergency, without that prior approval, you can be sent back to prison. And electronic monitoring is one of the growing ways in which imprisonment has been extended into our homes and communities. It is seen as a kinder, gentler form of imprisonment. And many people say, Yes, I would rather be sleeping in my own bed, eating food from my own refrigerator. Not having to get up five times a night to recite my prison ID number whenever the guard demands that I do so. But it is still a form of imprisonment. And as a solution to the physical jails and prisons, we need to be careful not to create similar structures in our homes and communities.

What we also see is this creep of criminalization into other institutions that are not meant to be prisons, but start looking remarkably like prisons. We see this with schools, particularly schools that serve low income students of color. So we dont see this in the Waldorf and the Montessori schools. We dont see this in the schools in the wealthier, whiter suburbs of, name the city of your choice. What we see this is in the schools that are often Black, brown, and immigrant, where the students and the families are from lower income brackets, and do not necessarily have the resources and the wherewithal to go someplace else. And we see these schools criminalizing students from an early age. We see these schools having more police officers than school counselors. We see students being brutalized and punished for acts that two decades ago would just be dealt with by the school. So we see that students are being arrested and put in handcuffs for things like having a fistfight. In some instances, which occur more frequently than anyone can imagine, we see that young Black girls as young as five or six get put in handcuffs by school police officers for things like having a tantrum because they dont want to take a nap, or they dont want to stop coloring, or whatever the case is.

Listeners who have small children in their lives, whether it be their own children, or their loved ones children, or their neighbors children will know that four, five, and six year olds sometimes throw tantrums. And no parenting book in the world says the way that you respond to a small child that does not want to do something and is throwing a tantrum, is to bring in a large law enforcement officer who will then put handcuffs on this child and terrorize them, and handcuff them to a desk, or put them in the back of a police car, or do something else that will cause them much, much more trauma.

Now that is not actually the way to deal with children, ever. But that is what we see with this creep of criminalization into institutions like schools, like preschools, like child welfare systems or foster care systems. So we see this idea that people should be treated as if they have somehow committed wrongdoing. Yes, tantrums are annoying. But they are not criminalized actions and they should not be punished in that kind of brutal way. And we see people being punished, sometimes brutally, for acts that a few decades ago, we would have said, Okay, clean up your crayons. Okay, you dont get to participate in sing-along because you broke all the crayons and threw a tantrum, and it took us 20 minutes to have to deal with you. So were not going to allow you to do this. Or were going to talk to your parents about that. But we do not respond with brutal physical punishment, or we should not. And we are seeing in an increasing number of instances this idea of punishment, carcerality creeping into our systems.

KH: I just want to say that as someone who has experienced that carcerality, in the mental healthcare system, and in other systems that were supposed to be offering me assistance when I was younger, I felt really seen reading Prison by Any Other Name. And I think a lot of people who have had these experiences will feel the same when reading this book. Because whats positioned as help is often a form of punishment, and the blame aspect is important, because the system has to depict people as failing to correctly participate in something that fundamentally works, in order to maintain itself, and to avoid having to make any correction. Society didnt fail that person, were told. They failed at participating in society, and they need to be disciplined into getting it right. And given whats happened to wages over the last 30 years, and whats happening to the environment, health care, and just all of the ways this society sabotages people, we have to confront the reality that people arent failing at something that works, and they dont need to be managed and punished and treated harshly, in order to do better. Abusing people further wont magically give them a functioning role in this slow motion collapse were experiencing, this thing Ruthie Gilmore calls organized abandonment. Punitive responses wont save people, and allowing them to be enacted on others will not save the rest of us.

So I highly recommend that people read Prison by Any Other Name, and really challenge themselves to recognize how easily most of us could be ensnared by one of these tentacles of the prison nation.

But all of these things said, I think a lot of people, when confronted with the realities of the prison system, are at something of a loss. Because while police and prisons are about the maintenance of order within the system, they also help us order the world in our minds. In the absence of them, a lot of people dont know where to begin. I know this isnt a question any one person can answer for the rest of us, and that there are many potential answers and experiments under construction, but what would you say to people who are listening and find themselves agreeing in principle, but who cant really picture another way?

VL: I think first of all, they should think back to their own interactions. In their families, in their communities about how they deal with harm and violence. So most of us when confronted with harm done to us by people that we love or care about, or maybe even people that we dont like and dont care about but are in our communities, often do not go to the police as a first step. Again, as I mentioned earlier, over half of violent crimes are not reported to the police each year. So we are already not going to the police and to the prison system to resolve our conflicts, including conflicts that are involving violence.

So A, we need to think about ways in which we have dealt with harm and violence in our own lives. And some of that might be, I wish I had responded differently. Not necessarily, Oh, I have this magical solution. But its also thinking about what else can be done. One of the insidious things about policing in prisons and this reliance on policing in prisons is it has shrunk our imagination so that we do not think that we individually or collectively can deal with conflict or harm on our own. And instead, we have to outsource it to this violent institution that takes up more and more of our resources.

So I would say, first of all, look at some of the experiments, initiatives, and projects that have been happening. Some of them are relatively new that have come up in the past year or two. Some of them have been long-standing initiatives. In the back of my book, I list several places where people can go to start looking for blueprints and roadmaps on how to address harm without calling the police. We have to understand it is not a one-to-one solution. We do not take out everybody who is convicted of X and then put in a similar sized one-size-fits-all solution. So if 55 percent of people have been incarcerated for violence, we dont take out prison as the solution and then put in something else that is as giant and mammoth, and does not address everyones needs. But what we can do is we can say what have other people done in these situations?

One of the things that Ive turned to is the idea of pod-mapping, which was started by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, which seeks to end child sexual abuse. And Mia Mingus, one of the co-founders and a long-term abolitionist, put it this way, is that abolition and accountability are a muscle you have to continue to practice or exercise. She gave some sports examples that I dont really remember because I dont follow sports. But she said such and such basketball player did not magically one day just start shooting baskets into a hoop all the time. He had to practice, and practice, and practice. And thats something that we have to do with abolition.

So they have an idea, this thing called pod-mapping, where you map out relationships that you have with people. Who can you turn to when you need help? And these can be different people for different roles. Maybe if you are in need of $10, you can take a taxi to the hospital or to urgent care. Or you need $10 for groceries. Who can you turn to? It might be neighbor X, neighbor Y, and neighbor Z.

Who can you turn to if you have been harmed by somebody? That might be best friend A, best friend B, best friend C. But those best friends may never, ever have 10 extra dollars to be able to lend you. Whereas your neighbors might say, Im really busy, or I dont have the wherewithal, or I dont have the skills to be able to support you if you have been hurt by violence.

Now, who can you turn to when you are the one that has committed harm? Because we have to be honest with ourselves in that we also cause harm to other people. It might not be forever lasting, traumatizing, violent harm, but we also harm other people in our day-to-day lives because we are humans. And who do we have in our lives who might say, Hey Vicky, that was a messed up thing that you did. What are you going to do about it?

And that person might be a community member M, community member, and community member O. But those people may not be there for you when you need $10. They might not be able to provide childcare. They might not be able to do other things.

So its important to think about what your relationships are to other people, and who might be able to help. And also, where you are in relationship to other people. So you might say, Neighbors, A, B, and C that can lend me $10. I dont ever have $10 to lend back, but Im home on Tuesday afternoons, and their kids can come over to my place and have a safe place to go. Or, I can be here if they need help during X, Y, or Z times, because I am home during this time, and I can be the person that helps them with this. So I think its building relationships, and building supports, and being able to envision before a crisis happens what are the relationships, and then strengthening those relationships as well.

Theres also a website called One Million Experiments that Mariame Kaba has put together that looks at ways in which people are experimenting with responses to harm and violence that do not involve calling the police. Theres also a gigantic 400 page toolkit called Creative Interventions, which is also available online that chronicles peoples stories and experiences dealing with harm, violence, and conflict without calling the police. These are not manuals. Theyre not like your stereo manual or the manual to put together your Ikea shelf in which you follow A, B, and C to the letter and voila, you have a shelf or you have a stereo system.

But there are ways in which we should and can stretch our imaginations to say, What else is possible when something happens? Instead of saying, Well, I can either call the police or I can do nothing, which are currently what larger society tells us are our only two options.

KH: Thank you for that. Are there any asks or final thoughts you would like to leave our listeners with today?

VL: I would quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who is a co-founder of Critical Resistance and a long-term prison abolitionist who says that abolition is not aspirational. Its a journey. And were practicing abolition every day and in many different forms. This is actually a paraphrasing, not a quote. And she points out that fair wages are a form of abolition. She points out that migrant justice is a form of abolition. Theres so many different ways in which we can work towards abolition. Because we have to remember that abolition is not just the tearing down of prisons in all of its manifestations, but also replacing them with resources and supports that actually meet peoples needs and effectively addresses and reduces harm and violence, therefore making prisons unnecessary and obsolete.

KH: Absolutely. And we will be including links to some of the resources that Victoria mentioned in the show notes, which you can find at the bottom of the transcript of this episode on our website at truthout.org. And, I just want to say, as someone who reads a lot about prisons, I really learned so much from your book, Victoria. And I really hope that all of our listeners will check out Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration and also Prison by Any Other Name, because I really believe that if a critical mass of people really took the time to process these texts, we might find ourselves living in a different world. And both are available as audiobooks, by the way, since I know thats important to some people including me. So dont forget to look for those links in the show notes.

Victoria, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a great conversation.

VL: Thank you so much, Kelly.

KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time. Ill see you in the streets.

Show Notes:

Victorias books:

Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration by Victoria Law

Prison by Any Other Name by Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar

Read more:

Getting Real About Prisons and Why They Dont Make Us Safer - Truthout

PESHAWAR: The Medical Teaching Institutions Appellate Tribunal has ordered the attachment of salaries of the hospital and medical directors of Hayatabad Medical Complex and a director of the attached Institute of Kidney Diseases (IKD) until further orders over failure to respond to an appeal of some employees against the abolition of their share in the charges of radiology and pathology tests.

The three-member tribunal headed by chairman Justice Nisar Hussain ordered the HMCs hospital and medical directors, the secretary of its board of governors, and the director of IKD to appear before it on the next hearing on June 2 besides submitting reply to the appeal within a week.

It took exception to the issue as neither the reply was filed by the officials nor did any of their representative turn up during the hearing into the appeal filed by Prof Malik Zeb and several other doctors, who challenged the abolition of their share in the charges of tests done by the radiology and pathology departments.

Calls them over abolition of staffs share in radiology, pathology test fee

Last month, the tribunal had admitted the appeal to regular hearing and sought the response of the respondents.

The tribunal is empowered under the MTI Act, 2015, to adjudicate on the grievances of all MTI staff members.

The appellants, who are pathologists and radiologists of HMC and IKD, had filed the appeals saying by misinterpreting the amendments to the MTI Act, the BoG had withdrawn their share, which was even unattractive, in the user charges of the two departments.

When the tribunal took up the appeal, it observed that during the previous hearing on May 6, the counsel for the respondents was present and directions were issued to the IKD director and HMC medical and hospital directors to file response with a fortnight.

The tribunal observed that despite the acceptance of notice by the counsel, no one appeared on their behalf nor did they file reply.

This indifferent and contumacious conduct of the respondents is highly deplorable which cannot be overlooked, the tribunal observed.

Senior advocate Mian Muhibullah Kakakhel appeared for the appellants and said the radiology and pathology were those specialties to which doctors rarely opted due to low salaries and limited work opportunities and professional development opportunities.

He said the government decided in 2005 to give shares to doctors in total earnings per test done through a devised formula.

The lawyer said the appellants opted for the specialty due to that formula and were currently heads of departments and professors.

He said those were diagnostics-based specialties and his clients provided services in HMC and IKD round the clock with one team serving in the morning and another at night.

The lawyer said the government introduced the concept of institution-based practice through the MTI Act, 2015, under which all the doctors, who could perform in their personal capacity and ran clinics later, were asked to examine patients in the place, which they used in the morning.

He said through MTI (Amendment) Act, 2018, the petitioners i.e. radiologists and pathologists were also made subject to it and in case they didnt opt for IBP, they wont be given share.

The lawyer said the 2018 amendment to the MTI Act was being destructively interpreted against appellants to whom it was not applicable and that their unattractive shares were being unreasonably stopped.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2021

Read more:

Tribunal attaches salaries of HMC, kidney institute heads - DAWN.com

Citing the likelihood that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will obstruct a bipartisan House bill that would create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, progressive lawmakers and campaigners in recent days intensified demands to end the filibuster.

"There are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election. And we're supposed to think that they'll magically work with us on passing our agenda?"Rep. Pramila Jayapal

House lawmakers voted 252-175last Wednesday to establish an expert commission to probe the events of January 6, when a mob consisting mostly of supporters of former President Donald Trump and his lie that the 2020 election was stolenstormed the Capitol, resulting in five deaths, a delay of the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, and Trump's subsequentimpeachment.

Thirty-five House Republicansjoined their Democratic colleagues in voting for the bill. However, it is highly unlikely that the measure will garner the requisite support of 10 GOP senators needed to avoid a possible filibuster, as McConnell (R-Ky.) appears poised to use the ultimate obstructionist weapon to torpedo the bill.

GOP intransigence has sharpened Democratic opposition to the filibuster, which is especially robust among progressive lawmakers and campaigners.

"The American people voted for progress, and we need to deliver," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)assertedSunday. "It makes no sense that one member of the minority party can trigger a minority veto. That's not what people voted for."

There are Democrats in the Senate who say that we need the filibuster for bipartisanship while Republicans are literally filibustering an investigation into the insurrection that could have killed them.

We don't compromise with white supremacy. End the filibuster.

Cori Bush (@CoriBush) May 21, 2021

A bipartisan deal was reached on a commission investigating the January 6th riot at the Capitol and Republicans are still blocking it.

Abolish the filibuster.

Stand Up America (@StandUpAmerica) May 24, 2021

Noting that "there are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election," Rep. Pramilia Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted Monday that the Senate must "end the filibuster so we can get to work."

There are Republicans who still refuse to acknowledge that Biden won the election. And we're supposed to think that they'll magically work with us on passing our agenda?

No. Let's end the filibuster so we can get to work.

Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) May 24, 2021

That work includes passing the For the People Act (pdf), a sweeping pro-democracy bill that would expand voting rights including for former felons, curtail partisan gerrymandering, strengthen ethics rules, limit money in politics and implement the DISCLOSE Act, and make Washington, D.C. a stateamong other reforms.

Although the House passed the bill in early March without a single Republican vote, the threat of a GOP filibuster bodes ominously for its Senate prospects. This has increasingly spurred Democratic lawmakers and pro-democracy campaigners to link the possibility of legislative success with ending the filibuster.

It takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass voting rights, a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, gun violence prevention, and civil rights protections.

But Republicans can cut taxes for their wealthy donors and corporations with a simple majority.

How does this make sense?

Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) May 24, 2021

END THE FILIBUSTER. PASS THE FOR THE PEOPLE ACT.

Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) May 24, 2021

Appearing on WCVB's "On the Record" Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said,"I'm ready to sign up and say it's time to get rid of the filibuster."

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"If you can get a majority in the House, get a majority in the Senate, and get the president of the United States to sign off, that should be enough to advance legislation," Warren argued. "And this piece of legislation for an independent commission, that's a good starting placea reminder why the filibuster needs to go."

This morning, @ewarren is the guest on OTR. She is pushing for legislation that would create a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Senate Republicans say they will filibuster. #WCVB pic.twitter.com/iHfGoeTDF4

Jennifer Eagan (@Jennifer_Eagan) May 23, 2021

Opponents reiterated the filibuster's racist rootsit has been used to defend slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and opposition to civil and voting rights legislationin calling for its abolition.

"It's important that we not continue to allow the filibuster to be a tool used to suppress the right to vote, that Black people have fought and died for," Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) told Axios on Thursday.

*Open tweet*

"The filibuster is a racist relic predominantly used to prevent a mostly white minority of Americans from losing control of the United States government."

*Send tweet*

Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) May 24, 2021

Others reminded voters of McConnell's infamous vow to obstruct then-President Barack Obama's agenda via the filibuster, with former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich tweeting Sunday, "Now, McConnell is doing the same thing to Biden."

A quick history lesson:

In 2009, Mitch McConnell vowed to do everything he could to block President Obama's agenda.

Now, McConnell is doing the same thing to President Biden.

It's time to abolish the filibuster and deliver for the American people. There's no time to waste.

Robert Reich (@RBReich) May 23, 2021

One formidable obstacle impeding potential efforts to end the filibuster is oppositionfrom Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.). At a virtual statewide convention of the Arizona Democratic Party on Saturday, committee members passed a resolution calling on Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.)who has refused to clearly state his stance on the issueto vote to eliminate the filibuster from Senate rules.

Prior to the convention, hundreds of progressive activists rallied in downtown Phoenix Thursday to urge Kelly and Sinema to end the filibuster.

"The filibuster has been used to stop the Voting Rights Act," Rev. Reginald Walton, executive director of the African American Christian Clergy Coalition, said at the event. "The filibuster has been used to stop the Anti-Lynching Bill. Guess what happens when that happens. People are hurt!"

"They want to mute the voices of Black people," Walton said of Republicans. "They want to mute the voices of Brown people. They want to mute the voices of LGBTQIA people. They want to mute your voices and we cannot let that happen!"

Original post:

As Frustration Grows Over GOP Obstruction, Progressives Intensify Demands to Kill Filibuster - Common Dreams

If education is, in Horace Manns words, the great equalizer, why hasnt a substantial increase in spending on education and a sharp rise in college attendance and graduation rates narrowed the income and wealth gaps in the United States?

Americans have the second largest number of years of education of any people in the world. Yet economic stratification has increased even among those with a college degree, challenging the widespread view of higher education as an engine of upward social and economic mobility.

The best explanation I have seen for this paradox -- that economic inequality expands even as educational attainment increases -- can be found in Cristina Viviana Groegers stunning The Education Trap.

A powerfully persuasive rebuttal to Claudia Goldins claim that educational attainment largely explains the decline in economic inequality after 1929, The Education Trap is anything but a thesis-driven polemic. This richly researched, methodologically sophisticated, well-written study of schooling in Boston from the 1880s to the early 1940s offers eye-opening insights into the shifting pathways into the labor force.

Much more than an impressive work of historical reconstruction, this book should serve as a cautionary tale for our own times, when, once again, the paths to an economically secure livelihood are undergoing a momentous transformation.

During the last decades of the 19th century, informal pathways into the workforce -- including apprenticeships and reliance on kin and ethnic networks -- were supplanted by formal education. It was then that education began to acquire the credentialing responsibilities that it holds today.

As Groeger demonstrates, a wide range of educational options proliferated around the turn of the 20th century. Alongside the rapidly expanding public high schools, there were proprietary trade, commercial and secretarial schools; normal schools; correspondence schools; and an expanding ecosystem of colleges, universities and technical institutes with highly differentiated missions and resources.

Indeed, the educational universe was broader and the options greater than today.

One of Groegers most important discoveries is the many attempts to create educational institutions specifically designed to serve working-class men. Some, like Northeastern, one of many YMCA and night schools, survived, but most efforts at industrial education failed, with profound consequences for the future.

The inability to create technical and vocational training opportunities facilitated the growth of Taylorism and what Harry Braverman called the degradation of labor.

Industry increasingly replaced skilled craftsmen with semiskilled laborers (who had been hired informally, often by kin or fellow workers, who were responsible for their training and supervision). Increasingly, hiring became the responsibility of expanding HR departments.

At the same time that industrial labor was proletarianized, many young women benefited from the shift to the new educational path. Office work, following a training course, offered a much-welcomed alternative to earlier kinds of female employment in domestic service and the garment industry, even at a low, pink-collar wage.

Meanwhile, management positions increasingly went to those who attended traditional colleges and the new research universities or prestigious technological institutes like MIT.

All of this should sound eerily familiar.

Our deep-seated belief in the value of education as the key to economic opportunity leads many who never earn a college degree to regard themselves as failures who are personally responsible for their lack of success.

Meanwhile, we severely underfund technical and vocational education and seem not to care about its inability to place those who complete those programs in appropriate jobs. We still do a terrible job of coordinating training with likely employers.

We call out less selective colleges and universities when they cut programs but refuse to fund them at the levels commensurate with the high-need students that they serve.

Then, the selective institutions, in turn, disproportionately funnel their graduates into the analytic, symbolic upper management and professional jobs that reap the largest rewards and exercise the most societal power and influence.

We need to recognize an unsettling truth: whatever else it is, our educational system is also a sorting mechanism. Educations failure to narrow class divides isnt an accident. Thats how the system currently works.

As Groeger observes, increased education was only one factor -- and not the most important -- in the decline of economic inequality during the mid-20th century. Unionization, Social Security, the minimum wage, the abolition of child labor and various kinds of government regulation also contributed.

We live in a very different context, and past solutions may not work today. But have no doubt: If we hope to diminish economic disparities, two- and four-year institutions have a big role to play.

Heres what Id recommend:

No one wants higher education to entrench or magnify economic inequalities. It need not. But if it is to be a great equalizer, it needs to innovate.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

See the original post:

Higher Education: Equalizer or Engine of Inequality? | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed

On May 25th a reckoning with systemic racism was reignited. It's still here and so are we.

In the week after the murder of George Floyd on May 25 last year, cop cars burned, storefronts shattered, and the streets thrummed and swelled with the U.S. largest-ever mass action. The action quickly formalized into the Defund the Police movement, a budget justice demand with abolitionist roots. Organizations across the country called on elected officials to divest funds from cops and reinvest them into education, youth services, housing, healthcare, mental health response teams, alternative systems of justicethe things the movement believes every community needs to be healthy and safe.

Some of the Senates top Democrats answered calls for the defense of Black life by kneeling in Kente stoles for the introduction of a relatively anemic police reform package called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020. But on a local level, politicians appeared more receptive to the policy demand that quickly gripped protesters and whipped pro-cop entities into a frenzy. (The much-decried property damage might have had something to do with it.)

Winter and a spike in COVID-19 cases winnowed down street actions, but the demand to defund the police has reverberated through this years national conversationoften as a scapegoat for people across the political spectrum. Criticsincluding former president Barack Obamahave knocked the slogan (and, by proxy, the movement) as incendiary, confusing, and unpopular. Arguments down the center claim defund is overly radical, blowing a chance at measured reform. Arguments from the right rest on the (statistically false) belief that cops spend their time fighting crime. Arguments from the left take shots at defunding as a step toward police abolition as impractical and unattainable.

From summer 2020 onward, politicians in both major parties (from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to former President Donald Trump), law enforcement officers, and police unions have wrongfully pointed to Defund as the sole explanation for spikes in crime during an unprecedented public health crisis and a period of severe economic downturn thats left millions unemployed and desperate. In November 2020, Democrats blamed Defund for a lackluster performance in the polls. And, just shy of a year after their roundly mocked photo op, Senate Democrats are gearing up to defang the Justice in Policing Act of its only meaningful reform by dropping the repeal of qualified immunity for law enforcement officials, which notoriously shields officers who commit constitutional violations and other acts of violence from accountability.

But according to Interrupting Criminalization researcher Andrea J. Ritchie, these attempts to discredit the movement have obscured its very real victories, particularly when it comes to challenging the deeply embedded cultural narrative that police power is the key to public safety. When I talk to people on the ground, they are very invested in increasing community safety and very invested in not being killed anymore, or raped or beaten, Ritchie told VICE. They're like, I don't care what the slogan is, as long as we're clear about what we're doing, which is divesting from institutions that criminalize, police, punish, surveil, and kill people and investing in the things people need to recover from this unprecedented pandemic and economic crisis, and the climate crisis that's ongoing, and the ongoing crisis of anti-Black police violence.

As Ritchie outlined in a January 2021 report titled The Demand Is Still #DefundthePolice, police budgets were cut; superfluous units were cut; enforcement areas, like parking and homeless outreach, were delegated to other city agencies; and campaigns a literal decade in the makinglike the Black Organizing Projects push to abolish the Oakland School Police Department and reinvest its $6 million budgetclinched their wins.

The political backlash to Defund doesnt engage very much with the fact that the police violence the movement aims to address is still happening. According to data from Mapping Police Violence, 223 Black people have been killed by cops since George Floyds murder. In April, Minneapolis Police Department officers killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright just 10 miles away from the then-ongoing trial of MPD officer Derek Chauvin, the cop found guilty of murdering Floyd. The inability of the police to meet the Defund movements fundamental demandstop killing Black people without more intervention is evident.

And while Defund has made huge strides, the actual dent made in fiscal-year 2021 police budgets in most major cities is significant, but its still relatively small in most places. Cuts that look big on paper also havent translated to capacity changesNew York City officials claim that defunding the police is to blame for a rise in violent crime, but the so-called shift of $1 billion out of the NYPD budget didnt remove a single cop from the streets.

Still, after a year of grueling work, a handful of organizers and activists helped VICE recap what the Defund movement has already accomplished, and explained how they will continue fighting for Defund, both in defense of this past budget cycles victories and to further dismantle the system.

We started to redefine public safety.

Last summers street protests produced an undeniable national spectacle of police violence. The well-documented use of violence on people protesting against police violence, coupled with an increased awareness of the highly racialized history of policing, helped germinate something special: a new consensus that maybe cops dont keep us safe after all.

In a June 2020 New York Times op-ed arguing in favor of police abolition and cutting police budgets and headcounts by 50 percent nationwide, movement leader Mariame Kaba asked, What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food, and education for all? This change in society wouldnt happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

Ritchie said the uncorking of our collective civic imagination is a bigger victory than any single FY21 budget cut or even the sum of all the budget cuts. It's not about dollars at this point, Ritchie said. There are more people engaged in, and really wrestling with, a conversation about what communities need to actually really be safe, rather than just continuing to default to policing. We're up against a pretty big behemotha 200-year-old institution that has deeply entrenched itself, not just in our city's budgets but in people's hearts and minds as what safety is, even when faced with concrete, repeated, ongoing, qualitative and quantitative evidence that it is not producing safety, and it's producing more violence.

Breaking that consensus has mattered on a city-by-city basis, too, especially for organizers specifically pushing to defund the police as a non-reformist reformone that pushes for change outside the existing power structureon the path to police abolition. Anglica Chzaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, told VICE: We were just all riding this train every year where more cars got added on in the shape of like more SPD budget numbers: more officers, more money, more training, more tools. It felt like we derailed that trainthe direction of infinite growth for policing that has been the consensus, even in a so-called liberal city, for so many years.

Still, Chzaro said she knows from her decade of organizing experience that the work is far from over. If we're trying to fundamentally shift the paradigm of public safety in Seattle, that's gonna require constant vigilance, she said. Thankfully, people seem to have signed up for the long haul.

We cut police budgets and diverted resources and manpower.

Ever read a city budget for fun? Of course not. The city budget process involves a series of dense, boring, and convoluted documents, doled out over the course of months. In order to sharpen their demands on city officials, Defund activists rolled up their sleeves and dug into those documents, delivering potential cuts and other targeted demandsa meticulously researched FTP!

Chas Moore, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Austin Justice Coalition, told VICE that unpacking what the Austin Police Department spends its funds on created obvious openings for his coalition, and others fighting for budget justice in the city, to carve out $100 million in Defund demandsa number he said he came up with on the fly while speaking to a reporter. We got our hands on the police budget and we started chipping away at things we thought could be moved out of the police department, like forensics, Moore said. We were poking at certain units that we thought didnt really need to exist, like the mounted patrol unitthey fucking ride down 6th Street on Clydesdales, like do we really need this?

Moore said he thinks this hands-on approach was instrumental in the Austin city councils decision to move $150 million in city funds from the Austin Police Departments $434 million budget, with $22 million in outright cuts, tens of millions more in reallocations, elimination of mounted patrol units, and the removal of a city forensics lab from police control.

Seattles budget wins specifically included moving 911 dispatchers, victim advocacy work, and parking enforcement out of SPD control and cutting millions of dollars in training, overtime, and civilian vacancy SPD funds, for a total of approximately $76 million in eliminations and transfers from the police departments $409 million budget. Chzaro said past organizing workincluding budget justice campaignsput Seattles Defund movement at an advantage.

Chzaro and others had spent years working in the racial justice space on campaigns like an eight-year battle to end youth incarceration in King County, Washington, where Seattle is located, and May and Junes street protests presented an opportunity to supercharge that work.

The experience of being forced to reckon with radical demands in the past in Seattle meant the demand to defund SPD by 50 percent was something people were ready to take up pretty quickly, Chzaro told VICE. Once we put out the call to defund, instead of it taking eight years to get signatories, it took eight hours to get dozens and dozens of groupsultimately over 40,000 individuals signed up to support the demand, and over 400 organizations.

KennedyEzra Kastle, senior communications director for Minneapolis-based, Black-led, queer feminist nonprofit Black Visions, said that Minneapolis was very ready to mobilize (and demand $200 million in cuts to the Minneapolis Police Department budget) in the wake of Floyds murder for one reason: Theyd done it so many times before.

Unfortunately, organizing was something that folks are used to. Folks are used to the police departments murdering innocent Black folks and folks of color. Folks come together like clockwork, Kastle told VICE. They understand who will be doing the mutual aid work to uplift the family, who is providing the medical services to those who are being tear-gassed, who will be providing the gas masks, the first aid kits. There are groups online organized around who's gonna bring the water close to this site in case we get kettled and who has a nice little yard where we could set up some tents. It has always really been us taking care of us.

Because of this, Kastle said he doesnt see any of the most recent budget changes in Minneapolisincluding an $8 million budget cut from the MPD, rerouting of property damage calls to 311, and a decrease in MPD headcountas meaningful beyond the symbolic. I don't believe we see victory, he told VICE. I think that these cuts and these changes operate in a way of pacification. No real, meaningful change can come until the police department has fully been abolished. This rings especially true after the headline-making city council vote to disband the MPD was effectively blocked from the November 2020 ballot by an unelected, judge-appointed charter commission.

We made the budget process something anyone could plug into.

Organizers continued to engage people through participatory budgeting, an annual cycle of meeting and voting designed to allocate funds most directly based on community demands.

Taking money from the police and reinvesting it in participatory budgeting has helped keep enthusiasm alive, according to Moore. He said the Austin Justice Coalition used a tool called #WeFund to get a sense of what Austin community members would like to see from their dream budget. That was very interesting, because that showed us that although I had said out of the blue we wanted $100 million in cuts, on average, people were taking away like $230 million from the police department and putting it in parks and rec, or the health department, he said.

Reimagining the city budget as a document for everyone also requires some serious translation. Ashley Sawyer, senior director of campaigns for Girls for Gender Equity, a member of New York Citys Communities United for Police Reform nonprofit coalition, said while New Yorks mayor and city council failed to meet their demand for a $1 billion cut from the NYPD budget, she and other coalition members were still heartened by last summers surge of interest. A lot of the things that we demanded, we didn't get, Sawyer told VICE. But the wins were this renewed commitment to defunding police and recognizing the ways that the money spent on policing is money that's not going toward creating healthy communities.

Another win? The fact that so many people turned their attention toward making the citys budget process something a layperson could actually follow, through Instagram graphics, political education sessions, readable analysis with actionable takeaways. and policy demands.

I cannot emphasize enough that the movement to defund isn't about people who necessarily work at a nonprofit organization or people who have the time to be at every hearing. It's about everybody getting access to the information so that they can meaningfully participate, Sawyer said, not just full-time activists. So many of the decisions that affect people's day-to-day lives are happening without their participation, and I believe that's intentional. In theory that could be plastered on the subway: Tomorrow, there's a budget hearing. Everybody who wants to say something, you can say something! But that's not how the city council works.

Access to information leads much more directly to calls to action: email targeted demands to reps, call city council members offices, testify at public safety hearings, bother the people who spend all our money on the things that hurt us until they give up. Throughout the year, people answered. Tens of thousands of people called into budget hearings across the country. 60,000 people sent emails to their council members in Philadelphia, in Dallasthese are people who are deeply engaged now in a question of how do we spend our collective resources? That, to me, is also the biggest victory, Ritchie said.

Kastle said he views both the upsurge of interest in reimagining public safety and the $30 million in funding that Black Visions and connected community-led safety organization Reclaim the Block received in donations last summer as the real tools to make meaningful change in his community. So far, Black Visions and Reclaim the Block have redistributed almost $9 million of that money to individuals and Minneapolis-based organizations through need-based funds and grants.

When there are young Black folks out here without housing, without legal aid, without food, you know, we don't go hold a press conference at City Hall and say, We're doing the best we can, he said. We truly reach out into the community and start to help folks. We do it without excuses and we do it with partners. And the fact that we are able to operate better than our city officials and our local police department should upset the public. People should be outraged that a nonprofit is able to govern this community better than its elected officials.

We need help making progressand defending what we won.

Defund has received a lot of pushback from law and order defenders: Organizers and street protesters have been targeted with trumped-up charges from last summer that many are still battling in court. Republican lawmakers in Florida passed a bill preemptively overturning local defund efforts; Texas, Missouri, Alabama, and North Carolina all have bills with similar aims passing through their state legislatures.

Cops are seeing the threat to their hegemonic hold on public safety and are becoming more outlandish in their claims to defend it, Ritchie said of the backlash. And the ways that kind of [anti-Defund] legislation is spreading across the country shows the power of our movement, but it also means that people are now fighting at local and state levels, and on multiple frontsfighting copaganda backlash and backlash from neoliberal elites who are like, Wait a minute, you're really trying to upset the status quo and you're really trying to reorganize society around community needs?

On a local level, organizers have had to debunk insidious counter-narratives from police themselves. One example: a claim from the Seattle Police Department that budget cuts were forcing them to ignore certain 911 calls. We've been able to dive very deeply into that data and see that actually, the numbers haven't actually changed much, if at all, Chzaro said. It's actually a success that we're seeing SPD spend more time on the quote-unquote top-priority cases, instead of Somebody called 911 because a kid threw a snowball.

Budget justice, racial justice, defense of Black life, and police abolition arent fights that Defund organizers in any of these cities can close the book on. In spite of the backlash and the exhaustion, organizers are still pushing forward with new campaigns and new experiments aimed at diverting city fundsand rearranging city prioritiestoward a cop-free vision of community health and safety.

In Minneapolis, Black Voices is mobilizing around the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign, a ballot initiative backed by a Black-led coalition that would allow voters to replace the MPD with a department of public safety staffed by peace officers. In New York City, NYC-DSAs DefundNYPD campaign (which, full disclosure, I have volunteered with) is pushing city council candidates to pledge to block any budget that falls short of its demand for $3 billion in cuts.

Meanwhile, Communities United for Police Reform is working on a state level to defend the repeal of 50a, a law shielding police misconduct records from the public, which police departments across the state have fought bitterly. In Austin, organizers are fighting to hold their city council accountable after the politicians reneged on a pledge to eliminate all police cadet classes in 2021, while the threat of state intervention looms. Organizers in Seattle are working to get its participatory budget process up and running, with Black leaders at the helm.

And, wherever youre reading this from, theres a great chance Defund-adjacent work is in motion too. Interrupting Criminalization, in collaboration with national organizations like Critical Resistance and the Movement for Black Lives, created DefundPolice.org, a hub for users to track pro-Defund legislation and plug in to local organizations across the U.S.something Ritchie said is critical in the fight against police power. The world that you were chanting for and dreaming of and demanding last summer is a long haul struggle to get to. Get involved in your local budget fight, join an organizationorganizations are containers in which we can have conversations, find community, and collectivise our energies, Ritchie said. We're not going to win a new world in one or two budget cycles.

Follow Katie Way onTwitter.

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Heres What the Movement to 'Defund the Police' Actually Won - VICE

May 24th 2021

by Jason Stanley

Editors note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. To see them visit our hub

POLITICIANS USE critical race theory (CRT) in much the same way that they use Keynesian economics: as cudgels in a propaganda campaign to advance their cherished political goals, with little regard for the actual philosophies at issue. CRT, a doctrine more caricatured than understood, rests upon the distinctly unradical claim that American institutions have systematically fallen short of the countrys egalitarian ideals due to practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies. It began in the 1970s as a way to analyse the intersection of American law and race; its creators were legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberl Crenshaw. It has since expanded its purview to analyse American institutions more broadly.

CRT stems from the need to provide a language for what institutions actually do, rather than how people in those institutions describe themselves. CRT thus seeks to explain the fact of persistent racial injustice by analysing the practices of American institutions. Such practices are racist because they perpetuate racial inequality, not because people within them seek deliberately to oppress individual and specific black people. Mortgage lending, for instance, can function in a racist way, even if the lenders themselves harbour no personal bigotry against non-whites.

CRT holds that such institutional practices are difficult to change and endemic to American institutions, and that they, rather than the malice of individual bigots or the supposed pathologies of black American behaviour, are primarily responsible for racial inequality. CRT is thus not about peoples individual characters. It is rather a claim about the structures, practices, and habits that perpetuate racial inequality. Even the most avowed anti-racist can participate in an institution with racist practices.

Martin Delany, a political philosopher and black abolitionist, writing in the year 1852, noted that even in Anti-Slavery establishments, by which he means institutions in Northern cities devoted to the abolition of slavery and the elevation of the colored man, by facilitating his efforts in attaining to equality with the white man, black citizens only occupy a mere secondary, underling position. Even whites most devoted to the cause of the advancement of racial equality hired black Americans for inferior jobs.

Such whites might have argued for a distinction between political and professional inequalitythey might have felt, in other words, that the law should treat everyone equally, but also that American citizens of African descent are best suited for menial work. But this is explicit racism, which no avowed anti-racist could accept. The professions of anti-racism from these whites, whom Delany called the truest friends, might have been sincere, but they coexisted with obviously racist practices. Delany denounces this faux liberal equality, declaring, There is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments.

Almost 170 years later, how has the American polity done on Delanys measure of equality? Consider the criminal-justice system, decried in W.E.B. Du Bois 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk as a a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. As of this writing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Black Americans are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans.

It is true that rates of violent crime among black Americans are higher. But just as higher covid-19 death rates among black Americans are best explained by differences in environmental conditions, higher crime rates are also due to racial disparities, such as harsher policing (a racial disparity not explained by differential crime rates), lack of decent job opportunities, homelessness, and poverty. Thus the longstanding American practice of addressing crime spikes through increased policing rather than, say, more job-training programmes is an example of a practice that perpetuates racist outcomes.

Inequalities in the justice system are mirrored, unsurprisingly, in inequalities in wealth. In 2016, the median black family had 10% of the wealth of the median white family. This is an improvement from 1963, when the median non-white family had only 5% of relative wealth. But it is a far cry from equality of attainment, 170 years after Martin Delany set that down as the standard for racial justice.

From sharecropping in the South to predatory lending in the North, white Americans have been materially invested in creating and maintaining racial domination. In addition to these material benefits of racial hierarchy, documented in a justly famous essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is the desire to preserve what Du Bois in 1935 called the public and psychological wage of whiteness.

Jennifer Richeson and Michael Kraus, both psychologists, along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white familyrather than the true figure of 10%. Their research shows a bias towards what Ms Richeson calls a mythology of racial progress. As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially betterand are approaching parity. This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstandingin a Gallup poll from March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, blacks have as good a chance as whites in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.

Many Americans believe that we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change. That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda. This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

But such panics might not happen if schools made more efforts to teach students how American institutions fell short of their ideals. Hence, in few arenas does the battle over CRT rage as strongly as in educationwhich fits the historical pattern. The aim of Du Bois 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America was to tell the true story of the end of Reconstruction (the brief period of racial progress that followed the end of the civil war), which is one of violent white backlash against emerging black political power. He denounces the teaching of history for inflating our national ego, and for years his work was overlooked in favour of an interpretation arguing that Reconstruction failed because black Americans were corrupt and incapable of self-governance.

More recently, Nikole Hannah-Joness 1619 Project, which seeks to illuminate how the legacy of slavery has shaped American institutions, was met by fury from the right, as well as demands for patriotic education. The same cycle again: illumination implying the need for structural change produces a moral panic seeking to reinforce a racist status quo.

The targets of the Republican attack on CRT reveal that the issue is not CRT, but something much broader. A recent education bill passed in Tennessee bans promoting division between, or resentment of, a racesubjective language that could easily bar teachers from discussing how race has shaped American institutions. In 1935, Du Bois explicitly argues that American history, properly taught, is divisive, as war and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. White Americans enslaved black Americans, and shortly after the latter achieved their freedom during the brief period of Reconstruction, excluded them by legislation and force from civic and political life until the 1960s. American democracy is young. These facts are divisive. The Republican attack on CRTs aims is thus a broadside against truth and history in education.

CRT urges America to reform practices in virtually all of its institutions, including criminal-justice, education, housing, banking, and hiring. The United States has attempted this before most notably during Reconstruction, when the federal government poured large resources into empowering a newly free southern black population. That period saw formerly enslaved black legislators elected across the South, and free public education offered to children of all races. The response to these drastic changes was moral panic, widespread racist terrorism and rapid reversal of progress.

Decades later, in the 1960s, the civil-rights movement fought for major legal changes to end the era of legal segregation. During this fight, its leaders were denounced as anti-American communist sympathisers. It should come as no surprise now that the same Republican legislators who want to ban CRT are also advancing voter-suppression laws that target black communities.

Dramatic structural change is hard, and involves missteps. Diversity workshops that involve little more than people sharing feelings, or being told their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them, are no doubt examples. But critics vastly inflate the importance of these missteps, to make such calls, and CRT more broadly, seem outlandish. When such complaints dominate the discussion, they fuel moral panic that is cynically used to halt and reverse progress towards equality.

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Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and is the author of several books, including How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. For a contrary argument, please see John McWhorters essay here.

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Jason Stanley on critical race theory and why it matters - The Economist