Unfortunately, thanks to a clerical error, Lima-Martin now sits in prison a mere 5 months into finishing what was supposed to be a 98 year prison sentence. Now mind you, Lima-Martin was released after serving 10 years of what was explained to him and his attorney as a 16-year-sentence with good behavior. However, as Fox 31 Denver reports, clearly someone dropped the ball here.

He says his appeals lawyer told him 13 years earlier that his sentence was just 16 years.

 

“She was like, in this appeals process, the best thing that could have possibly happened to you was that everything would be ran concurrent and you would have 16 years. And that’s what you have right now. He says she told him, in her advice, to withdraw his appeal for a reduced sentence.

 

But her information was wrong—as was the court file sent to the Department of Corrections stating his sentences should run all at once, instead of back-to-back.

 

“I would have never had a wife. I would have never had children. I would have never bought a house. I would have never done any of those things. But I did those because you let me out. And now they are being punished for something they had absolutely nothing to do with,” he says about his family.

 

It’s a punishment he says is excessive.

Excessive? To me, that’s the understatement of the year. In my mind I’d call a 98-year-sentence for two separate armed robberies where no one was hurt pretty fucked up. Why? Because there are people who have committed worse crimes who are sentenced to less prison time. Lima-Martin makes this point in his interview where he says, “People have raped, molested kids, taken lives and 15, 20, 25 years. And I made a mistake and tried to steal some money and I am given my entire life in prison? It just doesn’t make sense.” You’re exactly right, Mr. Lima-Martin; none of it makes sense.

What’s really hard for me to understand here, is that Lima-Martin’s sentence didn’t fall under mandatory minimum guidelines — at least, it doesn’t seem to be that way. Perhaps if that were the case, as bad as it is, perhaps this story may have been easier to stomach. According to a 2014 report from National Research Council the likelihood that someone arrested would be sent to prison increased substantially between 1980 and 2010. Additionally, as of 2004, just 5 percent of all felony convictions came from a jury. The rest come from defendants who would rather plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence and not risk a heavier sentence with a jury trial. Here’s the thing: Lima-Martin was not convicted by a jury of his peers at a trial.

Which in this case calls into question the motives of the people who aggressively prosecuted Lima-Martin under the now defunct COP (Chronic Offender Program). A program which comprises of a board of police, citizens and district attorneys who approved cases where there were multiple acts of criminal behavior or extensive criminal history. From the looks of it, Lima-Martin would have been better off with a trial by jury or even a mandatory minimum sentence as a rapist or a murderer had the COP program not been in place. But I guess when certain people want to sell the community on being tough on crime, this is what you get.

His eight convictions led to a 98-year sentence. The judge ordered each sentence to run consecutive to each other.

 

Three counts of armed robbery got him 10 years each for a total of 30 years. It’s a crime that normally carries a term of just four to 16 years.

 

The convictions also included three counts of kidnapping, each carrying 16 years.

 

Rich Orman, Senior Deputy DA with the 18th Judicial District says Lima-Marin was charged with kidnapping because he moved three people from the front of the store to the back.

 

He also got 10 years each for two counts of burglary.

 

The Colorado State Public Defender says had Lima-Marin’s case been prosecuted today, he’d likely get a more reasonable offer of between 20 to 30 years.

Lima-Martin says “I did something wrong. I acknowledge the fact I did something wrong. I take responsibility for the fact I did something wrong. But I also believe I completed the punishment, the just punishment for the crime.” Now I’m sure that some of you may not agree that Lima-Martin has repaid society for his crime. And I’m sure that to some of you, a 98-year-sentence is just. Keep in mind that as it now stands, Lima-Martin will not be eligible for parole until 2054 — that’s 40 years from now when he’s 75. Now you tell me, given that he has already proven that he can be a good citizen, is it just that he is made to spend the next 40 years in prison — after having already served 10 years — for a crime he committed at 19 and more so for juvenile convictions.

Seriously, I can’t wait to hear your answer.

Rene Lima-Martin and Family

In the mean time, Rene Lima-Martin’s wife has started a petition asking that he is released. If you’re like me and you believe that was he has to endure is “cruel and usual punishment” — a clear violation of the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution. Please, do the right thing by clicking and signing the petition below, will you? If so, let me know that you did in the comments.

FREE RENE LIMA-MARTIN PETITION

The post Rene Lima-Martin: Court Error Orders Free Man Back to Prison for 98yrs After Serving a 10yr Sentence appeared first on Madness & Reality.

But you get the point, as usual, media outlets continue to be fascinated with the idea of a violent criminal having the opportunity to be within arms length of President Barack Obama. What is tragic, in my opinion, is how little many are empathetic towards the mental health of Thamsanqa Jantjie. Not that anyone reading this may care, but as bad as South Africa’s mental health system is currently, it’s good to see that he’s getting help.

This from Al Jazeera:

The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial, who said he suffered a schizophrenic episode during the service after being labelled a fraud, has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, South African media reported.

Thamsanqa Jantjie sparked outrage with his performance at last week’s event, with sign language experts saying his translations of the eulogies, including those by US President Barack Obama and Mandela’s grandchildren, amounted to little more than “flapping his arms around” and “just making funny gestures”.

On Thursday the Star newspaper said Jantjie’s wife Siziwe had taken her husband for a check-up at a psychiatric hospital near Johannesburg on Tuesday, which suggested he be admitted immediately.

“The past few days have been hard. We have been supportive because he might have had a breakdown,” she was quoted as saying.

Jantjie had been scheduled for a check-up at the Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, on December 10.

But the appointment was moved after he was offered the job to sign at the memorial which took place the same day, the newspaper reported.

Jantjie has claimed that he is a qualified signer but that his performance was down to a sudden attack of schizophrenia, for which he takes medication.

“I saw angels falling on the stadium. I heard voices and lost concentration,” he has said.

Local media have since reported that he was part of a mob that burnt two people to death 10 years ago, allegations he has denied, and that he had also faced rape, kidnapping and theft charges.

Mandela’s memorial was attended by nearly 100 sitting and former heads of state or government. The government apologised to the deaf community following the scandal.

In recent media interviews, Jantjie has come across as incoherent.

In his home province of Free State, local media have accused Jantjie of impersonating a lawyer and a traditional healer, though he has not commented on those claims.

Prior to this latest development, a South African deputy minister explained that the company who hired the sign language interpreter has “vanished into thin air.” Thankfully, however, there’s at least one institution available to tend to the needs of Thamsanqa Jantjie and other like him. Because according to Think Progress, when it comes to mental health care in South Africa there’s a lot to be desired.

There is no official mental health policy in South Africa. The country drafted a set of policies in this area in 1997, but they weren’t officially put into practice, and mental health services remain decentralized and underfunded throughout the country’s provinces. Although lawmakers passed a relatively progressive Mental Health Care Act in 2002, it’s not necessarily funded or enforced in the absence of this official policy.

That’s created an environment in which there’s a huge need for this type of medical care that’s largely going unmet. It’s estimated that one in five people in South Africa struggles with mental health issues, but nearly 75 percent of them aren’t getting the treatment they need. Just 15 percent of South Africans can afford private sector health care, but there are big shortages in the public health sector — there are only 18 beds in mental health facilities for every 100,000 people, and just one percent of them are specifically reserved for minors.

Those statistics may even be relatively optimistic, according to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), because many people don’t realize they have mental health issues in the first place. Mental health stigma is yet another stumbling block to connecting South Africans with the treatment they need.

“In Zulu, there is not even a word for ‘depression’ — it’s basically not deemed a real illness in the African culture,” SADAG’s operations director, Cassey Chambers, explained in an interview in October. “As a result, sufferers are afraid of being discriminated against, disowned by their families or even fired from work, should they admit to having a problem. There is still the perception that someone with a mental illness is crazy, dangerous or weak. Because there is often an absence of physical symptoms with mental illness, it is considered ‘not real,’ a figment of the imagination.”

While we may find comic relief at the expense of a mentally ill man, it’s important to note that there are many like him here in the United States in need of care. Unfortunately, for many like him, the only resource for mental health care are the many overcrowded jail cells across the country.

Here in the United States, gaps in the mental health care system — including a dwindling number of available beds in psychiatric hospitals — prevent some people from receiving the treatment they need, sometimes withtragic consequences. States have been slashing funding for these services for years, a dynamic that’s pushed a growing number of mentally ill Americans into the criminal justice system. Nearly half of psychiatrists don’t accept private insurance, and many Americanssimply cannot afford mental health treatment.

Watch the following report:

The post Fake Sign Language Interpreter Admitted to Mental Health Facility appeared first on Madness & Reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When these conditions are met, it is claimed, vengeance leads us to justice. However, rappers and street poets tell us a cautionary tale — the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. For many people living in marginalized communities, the overriding sentiment is that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

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

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

Consider the ongong trail regarding the racially inspired stop and frisk policies of the NYPD. Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these undermine not just rights in the U.S., but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

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

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

Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious America dooms the justification of punishment. In the U.S. the system of punishment costs about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, often for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment.

The main justification or rationale for punishment is in actuality about social control, not desert. Many artists, activists and just plain people from besieged communities know this all too well through often humiliating personal experience. The philosophical roots of punishment as social control come from what is known as the “consequentialist” school who argued that punishment can only be justified when it has good consequences for society. Particularly, punishment is rationalized by considerations of deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation.

Deterrence is achieved when, through punishment, people who commit crimes or might potentially commit crimes are discouraged from doing so. Rehabilitation is achieved when a person who has committed a crime no longer has the desire to commit crimes and that desire is replaced by a respect for the social contract. Incapacitation is achieved when those who have committed crimes can no longer do so because they are incarcerated. Artists, activists, and people from the streets rightfully express skepticism about whether anything but incapacitation is achieved by punishment.

I have shown that the moral standing of a criminal justice system becomes precarious when the rights of members of groups that are considered outsiders are not protected. This makes it difficult to secure respect for the law, which lessens the prospects for rehabilitation. Deterrence is similarly undermined when the conditions outside of prisons resemble a jungle. When people are poor, unemployed, without hope, locked out of educational and economic opportunities, and subjected to the trauma of violence and police abuse, prison becomes something less foreboding. I would submit that the separation between prisons and the largely black and brown communities that feed them is a delusion. People move from medium and maximum-security communities to medium and maximum-security prisons and back again. And we call this “reentry (another fallacy).

Of course, prison is in many ways worse than life on the streets, but the point here is that people in difficult social circumstances are more willing to take risks, especially when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, the “dream explodes.” This fact, which is part of the trauma of living in the ghetto, weakens the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent.

What we’re left with here is incapacitation and it is the wholesale incapacitation of mostly black and brown men…

Notes:
“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement
Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are from the Bureau of justice Statistics
Resources
Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.
Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February ), 41-60.

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This from AlterNet:

It would appear to be an open and shut case. Videos of conditions in the New Orleans Parish Prison shown in federal court yesterday showed deplorable, dangerous and out-of-control conditions, including inmates shooting up, drinking beer, and one shooting and waving a loaded gun. Other videos have shown inmates wandering around Bourbon Street, telling beat cops that they are supposed to be in jail, and sexual misconduct in plain views of deputies. Manuel David Romero testified that one out of every three or four inmates has been assaulted in the prison—32 have been stabbed, and 698 have been otherwise, which is the highest number he has ever seen in his long career in corrections. “I have not seen numbers this large,” Romero told the Times Picayune. “What it tells you is, it’s basically a total lack of security program.”

With no classification system to separate violent from non-violent offenders, and deputies who appear to freely allow contraband, sexual assault, gambling and prisoners to come and go, it’s no wonder the inmates feel unsafe. Overcrowded, trash-strewn cells are par for the course.

To address the problem, the U.S. Department of Justice joined with the Southern Poverty Law Center to bring a class action suit against New Orleans Sheriff Marlin Gusman. Last December, the sheriff, law center and federal officials said they had reached an agreement to clean up conitions. At stake now is whether that agreement will rise to the level of becoming a consent decree, which is legally binding.

The City of New Orleans is fighting the decree on the grounds that it would be ruinous to the city’s budget, although Mayor Mitch Landrieu agrees that the videos are “outrageous.” He would rather see the federal judge put the jails into receivership.

Meanwhile, some of the inmates have been seen wandering the streets, and a few more have died in prison. (source)

But seriously, I know New Orleans happens to be a rough city and was at one time the murder capital of the United States. That said, is it me, or is it pretty bad when prisoners have to complain about not being safe in prison? As bad as it sounds in there, you’d think the streets are a lot safer, yes?

This last year from Mother Jones:

As hellholes go, there are few worse places in America than the Orleans Parish Prison.

New Orleans’ teeming city jail first hit the radar of most Americans following Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of inmates were abandoned for days in flooded cells without food, water, ventilation, or electricity—some of them “standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests,” according to the ACLU. But OPP’s problems did not begin with Katrina, nor end in the storm’s wake, when prisoners were shipped back to the jail’s surviving buildings.

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of OPP’s inmates. The 38-page complaint—which names as defendants Sheriff Marlin Gusman, along with the jail’s wardens and medical directors—describes a facility where prisoners “are at imminent risk of serious harm.” About 44 percent of the inmates are there awaiting trial, and haven’t been convicted of the crimes they were charged with. But pretrial detention at OPP, the suit contends, is in itself a brutal punishment that can expose people to physical and sexual abuse, and even death.

“Rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace,” the lawsuit states. “Violence regularly occurs at the hands of sheriffs’ deputies, as well as other prisoners…People living with serious mental illnesses languish without treatment, left vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. These conditions have created a public safety crisis that affects the entire city.”

“It’s just complete lawlessness in there,” Katie Schwartzmann, the SPLC attorney representing the prisoners, told us in an interview. “The place is full of knives. There are tons of assaults, beatings.”

[…] Stints at OPP are particularly horrendous for inmates with mental illness, whom the SPLC believes make up as much as two-thirds of the jail’s population—their condition often goes undetected. “There’s not even a classification system,” says Schwartzmann, “so people who have disabilities that make them vulnerable have a really hard time of it.”

When inmates are booked into OPP, the lawsuit notes, prison officials suspend their medications for 30 days and sometimes longer: “Unsurprisingly, this practice causes some individuals to experience suicidal ideation.” When this happens, “suicidal prisoners with mental health needs are transferred to a direct observation cell, in which they are held almost naked for days.”

Schwartzmann cites one inmate, William Goetzee, who tried to snatch a security officer’s gun outside a courthouse, professing that he wanted to kill himself. “They bring him to OPP,” she says. “He attempted to hang himself. They cut him down and two days later he killed himself by eating toilet paper. He ate enough toilet paper that he asphyxiated. Tell me if that’s not deliberate indifference!”

Inmates deemed mentally ill but not suicidal “are transferred to the psychiatric tiers—where they are locked down in their cells for 23 hours a day and deprived of mental health interventions,” notes the complaint. “People living there are not allowed to go outside or visit with their families. Overhead lights are on 24 hours per day, and the tier contains actively psychotic people living on the ground in overcrowded cells. Deputies do not walk the tiers. Rape is rampant.”

Prisoners seeking mental health services, the suit continues, “are discouraged from seeking necessary care” not only by the strict lockdown but also because they are charged a copayment for submitting the request.

Question: with 2.5 million currently incarcerated in America, is this surprising to anyone?

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Of course people would argue that Lupe Fiasco’s tearful interview explaining the continual violence, gross disenfranchisement and hopelessness in his hometown of West Side Chicago should be the very reason why he should vote.

On the contrary, it has provided the impetus for him to be vocal about not voting and seeing it useless for the average person whose interests are never served.

Lupe’s perspective, in truth, is the reason why black and brown youth
are ever so turned off about the voting process 4 years since they
largely participated in the 2008 presidential elections.

Though they say
politics are local, the youth were reined into the national election,
thus staying mis-educated about the issues on the local level. There is a difference between casting a ballot and being politically active; however, most “activists” were not interested in that part of the equation. Mentoring youth, and their activists  to understand the importance of localized political engagement would only mess up Sharpton’s time at the salon to get his edges retouched.

As a
result, local politics remained the same—completely failing and
disregarding the same population that was mobilized to vote for them.

Nonetheless, this reality also pushes Lupe to be politically engaged in his music and beyond.

Lupe who  is currently providing, free, healthy food during Ramadan,
articulates the contradictions and ironies he sees in US policies and
social order. Lupe’s latest single, “Freedom Ain’t Free” provides
insight into the conundrum, corporate exploitation and chaos that the
average young person navigates in the midst of profiling, unemployment,
and streamlined resources to be a productive citizen.

I agree with Lupe when he states in his latest single, “America’s a big motherfuckin’ garbageman.” And as he says in the interview, this system has eaten and thrown away many of his peers. The brilliant and provocative emcee who also attended and supported
Occupy Wall Street pointed out in this interview that some of cats on
his block are either imprisoned or jail, haunting him today as harsh
testaments that black and brown Chicago communities and blighted and
burning.

The MTV interview showed a previous Lupe interview when he first came out six years prior. He was a hood kid who used skating as a way to balance his life. When he went to the other side of town, the place he called home, he described is displeasure with the high levels of disenfranchisement that his community endures.

The two frames are juxtaposed realities that the average inner city youth lives. On one hand, we are entrenched with visuals and realities of social-political-cultural implosion from Brooklyn to Oakland , but on the other hand, we live a parallel to an alternative life of the hipster movement, a commercialized, and fresh-faced Justin Bieber-esk campaign that borrows heavily from our culture, minus the poverty and prison records.

And that is how a lot of us youth live, even if we have made it, we must all go home. Even if we are second and third generation “middle and upper class” black people, we all have family members who are struggling. And while Lupe enjoys the lightness he feels in his career choice, his travels, and his evolution as a human, he wears the weight of his people on his shoulders.

Though Pete Rock is pissed that Lupe took his legendary beat that was used in “They Reminisce Over You (TROY),” a song that memorializes friend Trouble T, he is simply the pot calling the kettle black since he stole it from Tom Scott and the California’s Dreamer’s song “Today”.

Love the lyrics in Lupe’s shit. Rip it brother on both ends.

Profound line
Crucifixes, racism and the land grab/Katrina, Fema trailers, human body sand bags

Another dope line
Say that we should protest/Just to arrested/That goes against all my hustling ethics/A bunch jail niggas say its highly ineffective

Speaking truth line

Down at the Lakota Sioux casino/A whole culture boiled down to given you Pokeno

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Systemic racism? What the hell is that? They ain’t burning crosses and hanging Black folks anymore. Hell, we’s post-racial now, RiPPa! Yeah I know, stories or studies like the following and the one I shared recently about Black folks and bankruptcy are all made up. Yep, studies such as this one aren’t valid. That is, unless they come from white comedians in Blackface on college campuses across America. I mean, why even listen to complaining Black folks, right?

A new academic study of 58,000 federal criminal cases has found significant disparities in sentencing for blacks and whites arrested for the same crimes. The research led to the conclusion that African-Americans’ jail time was almost 60% longer than white sentences.

According to M. Marit Rehavi of the University of British Columbia and Sonja B. Starr, who teaches criminal law at the University of Michigan Law School, the racial disparities can be explained “in a single prosecutorial decision: whether to file a charge carrying a mandatory minimum sentence….Black men were on average more than twice as likely to face a mandatory minimum charge as white men were, holding arrest offense as well as age and location constant.” Prosecutors are about twice as likely to impose mandatory minimums on black defendants as on white defendants.

In federal cases, black defendants faced average sentences of 60 months, while the average for white defendants was only 38 months.

The report concludes that sentence disparities “can be almost completely explained by three factors: the original arrest offense, the defendant’s criminal history, and the prosecutor’s initial choice of charges.” (source)

At any rate, what does it matter to have information like this if nothing is going to be done about it? Yep, simple-minded readers will say this is yet just another reason for people like me to “hate whitey,” I suppose. Rather than act in the interest of justice and equality. I’m pretty sure someone will digest this info and suggest that it’s better that Blacks are locked away longer, because we are genetically predisposed to commit crimes. Sounds crazy, but people actually believe we are.

The issue of mass incarceration is almost never discussed within our political discourse. That is with the exception of the occasional racist Willie Horton ad if you’d like to give the impression that as a candidate, you’re tough on crime. This is one issue that I suppose many see as a political liability. I mean how dare anyone running for president speak about the racial disparities in sentencing, the prison industrial complex, or even the opportunity cost of it all, right?

The post Post-Racial Update: Blacks Receive 60% Longer Criminal Sentences than Whites appeared first on Madness & Reality.

As a political scientist, I keep abreast of what is going on from the curious eye of an observer, and the nagging thought recently came to my attention that American Blacks are missing from the conversation of ‘how are we going to make it’?

I wondered if we have become so jaded (or so distracted with scratching by daily bread) that we are neglecting to bother to raise a voice while others scream their displeasure at the exploitative actions of those in charge of the way we live our lives.

The fervor of poverty and confusion consuming people of the world is nothing new to Black folks. Everyone knows and no one cares about the things that affect the lowest  man on the totem pole. We’ve sought our American pie and remain hungry.

However, this time we can’t ask for what we need.

There is nothing quiet about our needs.

We do ourselves a great injustice if we are not out there screaming, marching, and demanding society instill solutions for our people. By the throwing every bit of economic, intellectual, and collective power we have behind getting our needs met we have a greater chance of changing our plight in this country so that we are not again left behind once American/the World settles into whatever form of hierarchic society is next.

I found a wonderful article on Colorlines.com today written by Rinku Sin and from it I found several sources of inspiration and so I have quoted all that I found worth discussing.

The efforts to save Troy Davis were tragically unsuccessful, and Wall Street continues to operate, business at usual. Still, policy and institutions that perpetuate inhumane capital punishment and corporate greed are, for the time being, under scrutiny.

This is an opportunity for people of color to join in this dialogue of scrutiny. We would be insane to remain quiet about the systematic inequities that are specific to us as a group while the conversation is beginning to pierce the international stage.

We are collectively suffering due to an embedded system of financially rewarded racial profiling executed through the corporate criminal justice system and predatory police service industries. How do we demand a cease in the practice that generates profit based on the existence of our Brown skin color?

In economic justice, it is particularly tempting to ignore the links between race and poverty, as well as the profound influence of sexism and sexuality on economic hierarchies.

Now is the time to address those policies which extend above and beyond the issues of economic injustice, when mixed with race, economic inferiority causes disruptions our quality of life. The stress felt by other cultures who periodically experience financial hardship are unlike the repressed existence Blacks are forced to live under in the United States.

The affects of living under the combined strain of economic and racial inequalities diminishes everything in our race from our high infant mortality rate to our low life expectancy rate.

Blacks are screwed over from birth to death; the only thing high about our population is prison rates, and the potential to drop out. Low are our expectations of ourselves, our country and our right to demand consideration as citizens.

There should be conversations by the criminal justice advocates to see what can be done about establishing prisoner rights to ex-felons who have successfully transitioned into society. Those familiar with treating sexual abuse may look into developing programs with those groups whose work focuses on prostitutes, who in turn, may also be mothers, definitely at risk and indeed, victims of sexual exploitation.

As the unemployment checks dry up and the welfare eligibility rolls expire more and more women are turning to prostitution as a desperate means to make money. There are links to explore; I see plenty.

………white men are the standard of universalism, and if something doesn’t affect them, it is considered a side issue and not part of the universe………Building movements that include groups that explicitly address the racial, gender and sexual dimensions of our economic system is key to that process.

Black people know that if ‘it doesn’t affect a White man it doesn’t matter’; ask any generation of people of color and they will tell you the same.

Now that the White man is getting a taste of hunger pangs, homelessness, and the tart sting of humiliation one feels on the receiving end of a welfare line HE’S demanding that shit needs to change.

Blacks are still generally silent.

Now is the the time for us to make noise. I envision our participation in this conversation as a way of rubbing Timmy’s face in it. It’s not Timmy’s fault that we have had a hard time in American, but Timmy didn’t give a fuck until Timmy was having a hard time in America right along with us.

There are plenty of Whites who are disgusted at being a poor, but they are even more so angry at being as equally as disenfranchised as your average nigga.

Before we seek to “reestablish the Middle Class” the country needs solutions and some of those solutions should come in the form of ideas and businesses created to take into consideration the specific needs of a demographic of people who never made it to become “Middle Class” .

The challenge remains, however, to fully integrate seemingly non-economic concerns that pre-occupied all of the people who attended a workshop on wedge issues that I joined. My co-panelists were Carol McDonald from Planned Parenthood, Darlene Nipper from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Jackie Mahendra from Change.org. The four of us told our stories about how we countered conservative attempts to grind down American support for reproductive rights, LGBT liberation, the DREAM Act and racial issues like affirmative action. The common message from the panel was that we have to tell our own stories on our own terms if we’re going to reframe these debates, and tie them to an economic justice agenda. I don’t have enough room here, but numerous organizations have explored the link between being a woman, being of color, and being queer to being poor.

This fight has no sides. No denomination. No agenda. No political affiliation that should have greater precedent than our collective racial needs.

Our indulgence in avant garde separatism has done us nothing; for once I hope we can see the forest through the trees.

We’ve been hanging from these branches long enough, don’t you agree?

The post Should Black Folks Care About White Men & Wall Street? appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Schools are supposed to be about educating kids, right? They are supposed to be safe places for students to learn and grow. It is bad enough when students have to fear going to school because other students have disciplinary issues that the administration is incompetent to address, but now, schools are moving towards policies similar to prisons.
Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class action lawsuit against Jackson Public School District in Mississippi for allowing an alternative school to shackle and handcuff students for hours on end as punishment for the most minor infractions, like speaking too loudly or not wearing a belt.   At Capital City Alternative School, administration would actually shackle students to railings and poles, then walk away and leave them tied up and unsupervised like dogs. One student, shackled to a railing for the entire school day for not wearing a belt, had no choice but to eat his lunch handcuffed. Other examples of the school’s bondage punishment policy include a 15-year-old girl handcuffed to a railing for hours after greeting a friend too loudly in the hallway and a student who was shackled up for not wearing the right colored shoes.

OK, now discipline is one things, but handcuffing kids for hours at a time for the most minor infractions? That is criminal, in my opinion.

Of course, if you go to the website of Capital City Alternative School, they pose a really pretty picture of their institution. One of their stated goals is to ” create a climate where students feel safe in the educational environment” I do not know about anyone else, but frankly, I would feel far from “safe” if I knew that I could be shackled for hours as a form of “discipline”.

The ACLU alleges that this extremely punitive environment is designed purposely to push the most challenging students out of the school. Now, if these children are already in an alternative school, they obviously do not have any options to complete their education elsewhere. So, what choice are they left with??

An alternative school should be designed with the end goal of teaching children the skills they need to adapt to the regular school environment AND to every day life. This school seems to be teaching children how to be prisoners. And, since the school wants to push out the children who have the most challenges to face, they are feeding the school to prison pipeline.

Is this effective education? If the administrators of Capital City Alternative School are not up to the task of educating the most challenging pupils, then they need to just get out of the game, and leave room for new people who actually give a damn what happens to the kids!

The post Jackson, MS Alternative School Feeding the School to Prison Pipeline appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Because democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and because some of youse Negroes just don’t get it. Allow me to present to you a few folks who do actually get it, who are making demands of their electorate. You know, the same democratic tradition which has long existed in this country? Well, for me it’s good to see people – especially people of color – rise up and let their voices be heard. After all, many of our ancestors died for the right to vote as we’re always reminded.

However, voting or casting a ballot, though important and very significant, is only the first step in affecting change since democracy is what happens between elections. And just in case you forgot, people in several urban centers while catching hell are being further victiomized (see Baltimore foreclosures here) and marginalized by proposed budget cuts, while wealthy corporations play with our money, as handed out by the government via tax loopholes:

More at The Real News

The post Democracy in Action: Baltimore Protest Calls for Economic Justice appeared first on Madness & Reality.

by JuJuBe (Joanna)

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The Illinois House has approved a plan to abolish capital punishment in a whirlwind reversal on a historic vote.

The legislation to halt state-sponsored execution gained the necessary 60 votes Thursday after an earlier vote fell short.

The landmark action comes nearly 11 years after then-Gov. George Ryan cleared death row and declared a moratorium on capital punishment in Illinois.

The legislation now moves to the Senate, where President John Cullerton says he supports the proposal and hopes it passes. But the Chicago Democrat says he won’t push his members to back it, calling the vote a personal decision.

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. Quinn has said he supports the death penalty but won’t reinstate it until he’s sure it works. His office isn’t saying whether he supports the repeal legislation. Source

Why do people even continue to support the death penalty? Think about it, with so many people being proven innocent by DNA testing after decades spent in prison, is the death penalty really something that we need in this country? Isn’t it safe to say that one innocent person put to death is too many?

Now, when I was a child, I was taught that “two wrongs don’t make a right”. So, what exactly does the death penalty do to bring about justice? Is the victim of a person who is executed get their life back upon the death of the perpetrator of their murder? Um, nope. Does the death penalty dissuade other people from committing crimes? As far as I can tell, it does not. So, why would we want execution to be an option?

The justice system is fatally flawed. It is a racist, classist system. If you are a rich white man, you have to do a hell of a lot worse to get locked up than if you are a poor Black man. And forget about the death penalty! Over the years, it has been shown time and time again that Black and Hispanic men are disproportionately victims of state sanctioned murder!

Once a prosecutor decides to seek the death penalty, a system is set in place that guarantees a harsher sentence for the accused. See, an individual who states that they will not vote for the death penalty under any circumstances can automatically be disqualified from the jury pool in a capital case. So, the jury pool is skewed towards individuals with a harsher view of what is just punishment for a crime.

The death penalty is also used as a scare tactic to frighten those who might be found innocent during a trial into pleading guilty without ever stating their case to a jury of their peers. How many people, even KNOWING that they are innocent, would be so scared of being sentenced to death that they will confess to a crime that they did not commit simply to stay alive?

The death penalty is antiquated and biased. It is not sought in only the very worst cases (serial murder and torture) but instead targets the poor and the vulnerable.

Fourteen states have already discontinued the use of the death penalty through laws banning capital punishment. Hopefully the rest will follow suit! “An eye for an eye” just does not work in a system that is so rife with corruption and racism!

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