dagblog - Comments for "Two Indictments of the War on Drugs Targeting Blacks and the Underclass"

Really good post

Machine à sous — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:07:39 +0000

In reply to Another quickie. People often

Really good post

Machine à sous — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:07:32 +0000

In reply to Another quickie. People often

Really good post

As far as I remember, the

we are stardust — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:20:26 +0000

In reply to Won't have a lot of time to

As far as I remember, the first real push for charter schools came from Washington DC; no small wonder, as their schools were deplorable.

I have a certain amount of heart and understanding for their plight, and that they are likely willing to support anything that might be better than what they have. But Arne's program leaves me cold, and it's not about the teachers' unions (many teachers aren't union). It's the teaching to tests, the software that evaluates the schools, and the public-private 'partnerships' that will bleed money from public schools, and then be controlled by business people within the schools--in the front offices. It's happening already, and soome of the schools have been found fudging their test score data.

Anyhoo, thanks as always for the digging; education is certainly one part of the puzzle that needs figuring out. And good news if the prison population is down for the first time; as was said, crime is down in general. Down is better than up.

And yes, there likely is no monolithic Charter School.

Another quickie. People often

artappraiser — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:58:40 +0000

In reply to Two Indictments of the War on Drugs Targeting Blacks and the Underclass

Another quickie. People often talk about "millions" of people being in prison in the U.S. without any concept of the real actual size of the problem, leaving it loom large like a bogeyman without any real perspective.

I think it's helpful to have a concept of the size and when the change in proportion occured.

Here's Pew Center for the States on the prison population, with the numbers, and suggesting something is starting to happen:

Prison Count 2010: State Population Declines for the First Time in 38 Years

For the first time in nearly 40 years, the number of state prisoners in the United States has declined, according to "Prison Count 2010," a new survey by the Pew Center on the States. As of January 2010, there were 1,404,053* persons under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities, 4,777* fewer than on December 31, 2008.

This marks the first year-to-year drop in the nation's state prison population since 1972. While the study showed an overall decline, it revealed great variation among jurisdictions. The prison population declined in 26* states, while increasing in 24* states and in the federal system.

In the past few years, several states have enacted reforms designed to get taxpayers a better return on their public safety dollars. These strategies included:

    * • Diverting low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison
      • Strengthening community supervision and re-entry programs
      • Accelerating the release of low-risk inmates who complete risk reduction programs

From the first PDF on that page, "Prison Count 2010," a 12-pager, the Federal numbers and the historic trends:

The federal count rose by 6,838 prisoners, or 3.4 percent in 2009, to an all-time high of 208,118....

Prior to 1972, the number of prisoners had grown at a steady rate that closely tracked growth rates in the general population. Between 1925 (the first year national prison statistics were officially collected) and 1972, the number of state prisoners increased from 85,239 to 174,379.2
S
tarting in 1973, however, the prison population and imprisonment rates began to rise precipitously. This change was fueled by stiffer sentencing and release laws and decisions by courts and parole boards, which sent more offenders to prison and kept them there for longer terms.3 In the nearly five decades between 1925 and 1972, the prison population increased by 105 percent; in the four decades since, the number of prisoners grew by 705 percent.4 Adding local jail inmates to state and federal prisoners, the Public Safety Performance Project calculated in 2008 that the overall incarcerated population had reached an all-time high, with 1 in 100 adults in the United States living behind bars.5.....

So it's approximately 1 in 100 adults that are incarcerated, not 1 in 100 of our entire population. And it's an approximate total of 1.6 million, states and Feds combined. And if you look at that PDF, you'll see the number is going down in some states and going up in others, and learn about what's been working as regards that and what hasn't.

Won't have a lot of time to

artappraiser — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 21:43:20 +0000

In reply to Two Indictments of the War on Drugs Targeting Blacks and the Underclass

Won't have a lot of time to discuss further and don't have time to do the topic the justice necessary, but I would like to quickly try to point out that as regards this

For those of us concerned about our nation’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis

from that page this is what Alexander supports

Black Leaders Address the Mass Incarceration of Youth

The Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) is committed to dismantling the pipeline to prison through education and by expanding programs that work such as the CDF Freedom Schools® program and replicating the Harlem Children’s Zone model in other communities through the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative. During a meeting in December 2010, Black leaders gathered at CDF Haley Farm to discuss the problems Black youth face and promising approaches. Watch new videos from the convening where author Michelle Alexander addresses the devastating impact that the mass incarceration of Black men is having on communities and Judith Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project discusses zero tolerance policies in schools.

And it is also what Arne Duncan/the Obama administration and the charter school movement supports and which most teachers' unions and their national voices do NOT support:

charter schools — a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s education strategy — are facing resistance across the country, as they become more popular and as traditional public schools compete for money. The education scholar Diane Ravitch, once a booster of the movement, is now an outspoken critic.

What is causing the push-back on charter schools, beyond the local issues involved ? Critics say they are skimming off the best students, leaving the regular schools to deal with the rest? Is that a fair point?

Note that the Diane Ravitch cited above is the education scholar that American Dreamer has posted on here at Dagblog as regards the unions/teachers topic. She disagrees with the Alexander/Harlem Children;'s Zone types.

Would like to point out that the case is that it's not "solidarity forever" as regards many inner city activists and teachers' unions as to solving the problem of "the prison pipeline;" there is strong disagreement and has been for a long time. And that some of the most vociferous complaints about city teachers' unions has come from inner city activists, as well as some of the most vociferous support for school vouchers and charter schools in order to address the "prison pipeline" problem.

I personally know that this debate has been going on for a very long time as regards the inner city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there is still quite a bit of a 'ghetto' problem and the disagreements about public education and experimentation with vouchers and charters for inner city youth. Like decades. And since then, I have a brother who ended up working as coach in Milwauke Archdiocesan schools with mostly minority students attending on vouchers, so I personally hear about the difference in the types of schools.

And this is also the reason I noted a lot of anger at teachers in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel comments when the Wisconsin union protest story was breaking because I knew of this division between minority progressive education activists and teachers unions for quite some time. For which I got grief from Sleepin' Jeezus, he didn't want to hear about it, he wanted only positive happy solidarity things being posted. Nothing about no inner city Milwaukee people being unhappy with the public education system. So I just let it lay and didn't bring it up again. But I'm bringing it up now, because you supplied the basic background in your post.

To simplify and generalize a complex problem to get my point across: there's a division in this country about education reform, with a lot of inner city activists and Obama types on the one side, and public school teachers' unions on the other. And it's a life and death argument for some of the former, because it's all about "the prison pipeline" problem. That there's a separate war on specifically teachers' unions and no other unions going on, and it's one that has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers, but rather, some inner city activists who don't want to sit and wait for public school reform in their area any longer with many of t heir children ending up in prison. Maybe this particular rap on the teachers' unions is unfair, but pretending it's not there is not realistic.

The point is that no sane

Desideforyourself — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:03:39 +0000

In reply to Bringing us back around to

The point is that no sane farmer will grow alfalfa when poppies pay 20 times as much.

Another point I wish I'd made is that typically gang war and drugs in the hood have taken their toll much more on women then men - crimes like rape and domestic abuse, women having to raise offspring (of the dead, the zoned, and the incarcerated), and just the economic hardship.

So as I noted, even though black drug use is less than white's, black violent crime - predominantly black-on-black - was much higher in 1992, so would warrant special methods to bring that under control. The correlation of black drug users, black violent offenders and black incarcerated seems to have been high, even though obviously not 100% correctly matched.

This will of course offend our Oliver Wendell Holmes view that "one innocent in prison is worse than 10 guilty set free". But I think more which should be offended is that what might have been justified in 1993 to get a catastrophe under control can't be modified 18 years later to squeeze some of the injustice out while maintaining the positive effects. But then again, economic opportunity played a good role in decreasing black poverty and crime, and we managed to get rid of that economic progress under Bush and now Obama. So I guess the Wall Street cocaine years are back with us.Support your local drug dealer/stock broker.

Yeah, Dick; it may be that we

we are stardust — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:00:17 +0000

In reply to that in places like West and

Yeah, Dick; it may be that we have never successfully dealt with America's Original Sin, eh?

Edelman mentioned the loss of rights I'd never heard about, though even felons losing their voting rights is a state by state matter, I think. It's also interesting and horrifying to watch the cases in which DNA evidence has shown so many people to have been incarcerated wrongly, and sometimes executed wrongly now that there is such a thing, and how many of those were black people.

Colorado voted to make

we are stardust — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:55:46 +0000

In reply to I'm doing a bit of

Colorado voted to make medical pot legal, but left some of the sales up to counties and cities; now lots of the pot stores are being closed down, and sheriffs are busting the growers. WTF? What a freaking mess it's becoming. Some people report that it really does help their pain, though it started giving me headaches waaaay back when I smoked any, as it does some odd things to the nerves and musculature in a person's occipital region. But if you smoke it, I hear you'll likely never get glaucoma. ;o)

The testing likely does need to be more indicative of timing; there are folks online that give lessons in substances that can disguise the presence of THC, I hear.

Typo? I thought it was just

Obey — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:48:32 +0000

In reply to Well hell, mon ami; I 'm not

Typo? I thought it was just emmmphasis...

Well hell, mon ami; I 'm not

we are stardust — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:46:00 +0000

In reply to For a loong time it seemed as

Well hell, mon ami; I 'm not going to quarrel with a little chunk of agreement here and there! But crap; didja hafta copy my typo, too, without fixing it? Wouldda given ya one American dollar...