Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – Part VII

This is the eighth post in this series, if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read the earlier posts.

Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, the Discussion is here, Part IV is here, Part V is here and Part VI is here.

In the third part of this series I wrote:

I will come back to this in another context, but for now allow me to express my disappointment that our President, in his sixth State of the Union address did not speak about this subject. It is one of the few areas where he might be able to find common ground with Republicans.

I urge the reader to return to Part III and read the relevant portion.

I cannot resist noting that in raising this issue, I did so well before the New York Times picked it up. But since they finally did, allow me to refer my readers to the Times article entitled “Unlikely Cause Unites the Left and the Right: Justice Reform” and their editorial entitled “A Judge’s Idea for Grand Jury Reform.”

Even the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which has been the frequent target of liberal ire has joined in calling for reform.

I quote from their website: 

The United States currently incarcerates 1 in nearly 100 American adults. America’s incarceration addiction grew during the late 1980s and early 1990s as state and local governments passed “tough-on-crime” legislation. For example, California’s “three strikes” law called for mandatory sentencing of repeat offenders, and New York adopted the “Broken Windows” strategy that called for the arrest and prosecution of all crimes large and small.

I do need to interject at this point that the “Broken Windows” strategy, which is a cornerstone of the NYC policing strategy of Police Commissioner William Bratton, is one that I support, even though that was a factor in the untimely death of Eric Garner, but a minor violation should not bring about an arrest. A citation, like a traffic ticket, is the proper approach, and certainly, even in the absence of proper identification, the violence by the police can never be justified, particularly in dealing with what should be no more than a misdemeanor.

ALEC sets forth as its solution:

Research and practice over the past two decades by stakeholders across various jurisdictions shows that there are better ways to protect our communities than mass incarceration. States still need to be tough on crime, but in ways that emphasize personal responsibility, promote rehabilitation and treatment, and allow for the provision of victim restitution where applicable. Community supervision programs and strategies that serve as alternatives to incarceration can effectively hold offenders accountable while providing them with an opportunity to get back on their feet. These policies are proven to reduce the rate at which offenders return behind bars, in turn cutting the crime rate, protecting our communities, and achieving the best public safety return per taxpayer dollar.

ALEC members have approved model policies that help maintain public safety and reduce criminal justice spending:

▪                Recidivism Reduction Act

▪                Swift and Certain Sanctions Act

▪                Community Corrections Performance Incentive Act

▪                Community Corrections Performance Measurement Act

▪                Earned Compliance Credit Act

▪                Justice Safety Valve

We tend to assume that overcrowding and abuse of inmates in our prisons is likely to be most prevalent in jurisdictions that are illiberal. But, regretfully that is not the case.

The Bloomberg Administration managed to get a consistently favorable press. But now that it has been replaced, its atrocities are coming to light. The New York Times reports that at Riker’s Island under the Bloomberg Administration:

...brutality spiked … An influx of inmates with mental illnesses, a breakdown in discipline and a lack of interest by top officials in the Bloomberg administration all culminated in the crisis facing Rikers today. The rise in brutality by guards has been particularly stark. During Mr. Bloomberg’s last term in office, use of force by officers against inmates jumped by 90 percent.

ALEC reports that:

California’s prison population is one of the largest in the country.

leading to:

...a three-judge court rul(ing) that California must reduce its prison population by approximately 40,000 in two years

and at a cost of $9.3 billion and a cost per inmate: of $45,006

According to the Huffington Post: 

Since 1980, higher education spending has decreased by 13 percent in inflation adjusted dollars, whereas spending on California's prisons and associated correctional programs has skyrocketed by 436 percent. The state now shells out more money from its general fund for the prison system than the higher education system... 

Fifty-five percent of the growth of corrections spending is the result of the state simply putting more people in jail. Over the past three decades, the number of inmates in California facilities has increased eight times faster than the size of the overall population. 

The report notes that, while the average salaries for employees of the state's world-renowned higher education system have stagnated or even dropped with regard to inflation, prison guards have seen sustained salary increases. Correctional officers in California typically make somewhere between 50 and 90 percent more than comparable jobs in the rest of the country.

In Colorado:

Twelve of Colorado’s 21 facilities had inmate population above design capacity in 2011.

In Massachusetts:

The total custody overcrowding rate for DOC facilities as of June 25, 2012 was 146%. The overcrowding rate for medium security facilities was 155%.  

In my home state of New Jersey the Dept. of Corrections has an:

Annual budget: $1,000,000,000. 

Average annual cost per inmate: $34,600

And this is while our bridges are falling down and our roads are crumbling.

But the human costs are even greater, not only for the incarcerated but for their families and particularly their children. According to the Urban Institute: 

More than half of the 1.4 million adults incarcerated in state and federal prisons are parents of minor children. The vast majority of incarcerated parents are male (93%) and are held in state prisons (89%). Among the men held in state prison, 55 percent report having minor children. Among the women, who account for 6 percent of the state prison population, 65 percent report having minor children. Over half (58%) of the minor children of incarcerated parents are less than 10 years old.

Great distances typically separate children from their incarcerated parents. Women are housed in prisons an average of 160 miles from their children, while men are an average distance of 100 miles away. These distances serve as a barrier to prison visits by family members. More than half of incarcerated parents report never receiving a personal visit from their children  Contact in the form of phone calls and letters often proves problematic as well. The number of calls or letters per prisoner is typically limited by corrections policy. The high cost of collect phone calls, reflecting surcharges imposed by telephone companies or the departments themselves, can make this form of contact quite expensive. Despite these barriers, nearly 60 percent of mothers and
 40 percent of fathers report having weekly contact with their children while incarcerated. 

See here. 

For which credit goes to the inmates and their families, not to our policies.

As pointed out above, keeping in touch by phone is made almost impossible. The New York Times reports: 

For most people, talking on the phone is cheap. But for many families with a loved one behind bars, astronomical phone bills mean they have to choose between covering their living expenses and staying in touch.

The problem is that prisons and jails give companies like the industry leader, Global Tel Link, monopoly contracts in exchange for a share of the proceeds...

Global Tel Link, for example, charges $9.50 to make a $50 deposit, and $5 to issue a refund when someone is released from prison or jail. It’s hard to understand why Global Tel Link’s fees are so high, given that the company has 57 percent of the state prison market and its smaller competitors charge far lower fees.

The good news is that the Federal Communications Commission has new rules that will cap the cost of interstate calls at 21 to 25 cents a minute starting on Feb. 11. The F.C.C. also proposed to limit the account fees, but a federal court suspended that proposal after the phone companies sued.

So we can see that there is money to be made from the families of those incarcerated. Of course they want more in prisons.

But even beyond that we have had a trend toward privatizing prisons. The ACLU reports: 

Private prison companies, however, essentially admit that their business model depends on locking up more and more people... ” As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. 

And while supporters of private prisons tout the idea that governments can save money through privatization, the evidence that private prisons save taxpayer money is mixed at best – in fact, private prisons may in some instances cost more than governmental ones. Private prisons have also been linked to numerous cases of violence and atrocious conditions. 

Isn't it time we did something about it? And what better time than when the Right is for reform.

Why are we not seeing action at least on this front?

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.

The Inscrutable Center Keeps Moving Rightward (Continued)

In my last post "The Inscrutable Center Keeps Moving Rightward" I concluded with: “Next time I will focus on the so-called Ryan budget, which isn’t really a budget, and discuss how the so called Middle, in the face of this Rightward drift, or is it a Rightward dash, makes excuses and drifts further and further right in an effort to stay in the new Middle."

So first the Ryan budget: Most of the publicity has been given to what the Ryan outline for a budget (his plan) would do to Medicare, but the media has given the impression that it would leave Social Security alone, save for raising the retirement age. That would be nice, but it isn’t so. First Ryan and many of his allies want us to believe that there is no trust fund, that all the money we have paid and are paying in Social Security payroll taxes have already been stolen; that they are no more than an additional tax for the general treasury. That just because the money has been invested in Treasury IOUs backed by the full faith and credit of the US, that it is not a debt that has to be honored. See Charles Krauthammer’s delusional rationality for this here and all the other Right Wing blogs that you can find by Googling “Social Security lockbox.”

But the lockbox exists (it is usually referred to as the trust fund) and will continue to exist, unless and until Ryan, (and Romney who has endorsed the Ryan plan) and their friends manage to get legislation through Congress that would indeed steal it. The only non-partisan source for this information is the Social Security Administration, who on their website explain the trust fund, how it is invested and how long it will last. In a PDF document which you can find here (highlighted at page three) the Social Securities Administration sets forth that the trust fund will be adequate for full payments till 2027, but the Disability insurance fund would have to reduce payments as early as four years from now. (Social Security by the way is not just for seniors.)

I have been urging some adjustments now because 2027 is not that far away, and the sooner we act the smaller the adjustments that would have to be made, and we need to assure the young that the Social Security taxes they are paying will not be stolen from them in a system that will not exist when they come of age.

However, according to the Ryan/Romney plan there is no trust fund, meaning they plan to divert it toward wiping out the deficit, rather than reducing the deficit with other cuts, (there are many that are in fact desirable) or (God forbid) taxes on the well off. According to the Huffington Post, Ryan/Romney creates an unprecedented new fast-track procedure to ram through Social Security benefit cuts. To quote from the Post’s article:

                       

Under Ryan's plan, any year Social Security is not in 75-year balance, the president and Congress would have to legislate changes that bring it to solvency through an "expedited process."            

In effect, Ryan would free up Social Security for fast-track cuts by turning it into a regular line budget item. Since Social Security is not part of the general budget, has its own revenue stream, and is forbidden by law from borrowing, it has always been dealt with separately from the rest of the budget. In fact, Ryan had to create a new fast-track process to trigger cuts for Social Security alone, because by law, it is excluded from fast-track reconciliation procedures for the general budget.  

Further, projections of Social Security's solvency change every year, which means that Ryan's plan could force big changes to Social Security based on very short-term variations in the program's finances.

The Ryan “budget”, as endorsed by Romney, then takes the Bowles-Simpson Plan, (there really is no such plan, since the necessary votes for a plan to be put forth were not forthcoming) - and which has not been given support by any member of Congress, and cherry-picks it. He proposes to enact the cuts in the plan, without enacting the revenue enhancements, and he goes far beyond the Bowels-Simpson plans proposals. In fact, by the time he is through Bowels-Simpson is no longer recognizable.

The proposals of the Bowels-Simpson plan have never been fully vetted, but the Ryan plan simply cherry picks them, and proposes benefit cuts over and above the savings that would result from raising the retirement age to 69, which I support as necessary. Incredibly, according to the Huffington Post it cuts benefits for 60% of "Very Low" earners, those with average annual earnings of $10,771 (for graph illustrations see here), reduces benefits for all by changing the cost of living formula, which would take a bigger and bigger bite out of the small benefit now given by Social Security each year, even as fewer and fewer retirees have the benefit of an employers pension, and erodes the link between earnings and benefits.

As for the Ryan/Romney plan on Medicare, which has gotten far more publicity, it would simple do away with the program and substitute for it a voucher system that would do no more than provide a small subsidy toward buying private insurance.

To put it simply and bluntly, the proposals in the Ryan plan are as far Right as could be imagined on the benefit side, and on the revenue side propose a drastic cut in tax rates, which is set forth in detail, and which are supposed to be made up by reductions in unspecified tax expenditures. Why unspecified? I suggest because they are like the bird in the bush. They are not serious, yet the media and the pundits evaluate this proposed “budget” as though the unspecified cuts in tax expenditures were real.

So one would think that the so-called Middle would denounce this document as a fraud and as a Trojan horse for the most Right Wing destruction of our safety net and our most basic regulatory system for the safety of our air, water, pharmaceuticals, etc. But what have they been saying?

Well, let us look at James B. Stewart writing in the New York Times with the title “…Ryan Plan, It’s a Place to Start.” Can anybody who fully and fairly analyses the Ryan/Romney plan truly argue that it is a place to start. Has Mr. Stewart bothered to read the proposals rather than its propagandistic claims? 

In endorsing it he quotes this claim:

The plan stands on two pillars: tax reform and reducing the long-term deficit by reining in entitlement spending… it contends that “the social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens” and is “poised to unravel in the event of a spending-driven debt crisis”. The tax code, it goes on, “has become a broken maze of complexity and political favoritism; it is overgrown with special-interest loopholes and characterized by high rates, both of which stifle economic growth and job creation.”

And then goes on to say:

“Does anyone, Democrat or Republican, seriously disagree?

Well, No! But what has that to do with the actual proposals in the Ryan plan as outlined above. Mr. Stewart goes on to say that Ryan is a nice guy and if the plan is bad, it is because he has no choice given the stand of his colleagues. So because Ryan is a nice guy, (whatever that means) we should embrace an outrageous plan on the assumption that he doesn’t really mean it. Duh!

Mr. Stewart goes on to say: “The question is what would happen to the big break that the wealthy now get — the lower rate on capital gains.” Yes, that is indeed the question! What is there that makes this “plan” (more accurate than “budget”) appealing, if so basic a question is not answered. All Mr. Stewart can offer is that the Club for Growth has criticized it –so it must have merit.

Fortunately an article that appeared on the website of the Center for Policy Research exposes the Stewart article for what it is. In a short article it demolishes the Stewart contentions and concludes rightly:

We have people who want to be part of the inside Washington conversation who praise the budget's courage and integrity. Then we have people who believe in arithmetic who call it what it is: a piece of trash. By the way, Paul Ryan is a very nice guy.

Comments, questions, or corrections, are welcome and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.

The Media – A Postscript On A Final Comment

When I wrote my post entitled: "The Media – A Final Comment" I had intended to leave this subject and move onto others that I believe need to have more light shined upon them. However, since then the Times has once again offended what I consider to be fundamental tenants of good journalism, and I cannot, or at least will not, be silent.

On the front page of a recent edition of the New York Times Sunday Review there appeared the eye-catching headline "Small Donors Are Slow to Return to the Obama Fold." That immediately struck me as rather bad news for the Obama reelection campaign. I wondered how bad that news was – how did it compare with small donor contributions of the 2008 campaign. I started to read the article, but than I paused – I remembered that the FEC quarterly campaign contributions reports were due on October 15. The Times article appeared on September 25, three weeks before the figures might become available. Did the Times get insider information that allowed it to jump the gun?

I read the article with great interest looking for the figures. There weren’t any! I waited until today to see if the figures released on October 25th would support the Times' allegation. A search of the web and of the Times shows no figures that would support that screaming headline.

What was there in the article that prompted the conclusion about small donors supporting or rather not supporting Obama? Did the Times conduct its own poll? No! The whole article, with its sensational headline was based on a few anecdotal quotes.

A man from Arizona, a Mr. Alasadi said:

When I was pro-Obama in 2008, I was thinking of him as a leader who could face the challenges that we were tackling,... Now I am seeing him as just an opportunistic politician.

Nadine Kurland, 62, of Falling Waters, W.Va., is quoted as saying:

I have been very disappointed in the president, he has not stood up to the Republicans.

After some more quotes like this and some concessionary positive quotes like:

I am happy with him, ... I just feel like the Congress is completely obstructing him.

The Times concedes:

Aides to Mr. Obama said the campaign was well ahead of its 2008 benchmarks. That year, Mr. Obama did not reach one million total donors until February, about a month after he won the Iowa caucuses.

A campaign spokesman said that the number of people who had given more than once to Mr. Obama this year and the number of people who had contributed for the first time were both higher than his total number of donors at the same point in 2007

...which seems to completely contradict the headline and the theme of the story.

So how do we get the sensational headline, which ends up being repeated by the media echo chamber, so that we find the Huffington Post quoting the Times article. As far as I can tell, the headline came first. Then the quotes were sought to support the conclusion.

That is not good journalism and illustrates more than ever that our icon, The New York Times, has clay feet. The editorial page may be liberal, but the news pages are there to draw readers. Sensationalism is the bi-word.

But the Times isn’t satisfied with reporting that the small donor segment has left Obama. Sunday, October 16, sees the headline, “Romney Beating Obama in a Fight for Wall St. Cash" but then concedes:

Mr. Obama continues to dominate Mr. Romney — and the rest of the Republican field — in overall fund-raising. He has raised close to $100 million so far this year for his campaign, three times more than Mr. Romney, as well as $65 million for the Democratic National Committee.

In fact other news reports show the President out-raising all the Republican candidates combined.

But it would be hard to realize this from the New York Times headlines. As far as the headlines of the Times are concerned what we get is small donors aren’t giving to the candidacy of the President. Wall Street donors aren’t giving donations to the candidacy of the President. But the President’s fund raising is greater than all Republicans combined. Well, will the Times tell us where the money is coming from, or does this not make a good headline. Or even worse, does it not fit into the message that has been decided upon without reference to any facts.

Maybe Fox, with its obvious bias, is better than the Times with its deceptive liberalism, or pretended objectivity.

Readers beware!!!! Read critically!!!!