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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2004Revolving door for the incarceratedChicago--A conference on "Incarceration and Detention: Race and Human Rights" was held in early April at the University of Chicago. It dealt with these issues through sociological studies, political analysis, exposés and personal stories. Three keynote speeches and two excellent panels explored the issues. NEIGHBORHOOD, FAMILY, JAIL Neighborhood, family and prison constitute a revolving door for many prisoners, who come from communities with poor schools, no mental health resources, and no drug treatment. Abuse and neglect may be common. Eight million Americans have been in prison, so re-entry into the community is a major urban issue. Some Chicago neighborhoods have more ex-offenders than some entire states. But released prisoners need a stable environment where social workers and job development programs can find them. Prisoners should be educated, even if they are lifers. Although affirmative action for minority students is often challenged, the "affirmative action" that jails them in disproportionate numbers continues to thrive. Predictions based on the number of school dropouts helps determine the number of future prisons. In Chicago, the number of African Americans in the police force, the state’s attorneys’ office, and on the bench is low. Illinois has gone from two prisons to 15, largely staffed by whites looking for jobs. JUVENILES AND WOMEN AT RISK Generations of African-American youth have been criminalized. Police finding drugs on a high school student can take him to jail against the wishes of principals and teachers who wish to keep him in school. It marks the student with a record and makes it more difficult for him to be accepted into school once he is released. In 19 states the death penalty can be applied to juvenile offenders. Since the 1970s, 22 have been killed, mostly in Texas. Presently 82 are slated to die. Youth often have inadequate counsel in this regard; for example, one lawyer persuaded an indigent juvenile to plead for a life sentence to avoid the death penalty, without realizing that the boy was too young to be executed. He was given life without parole. Juveniles almost always have mitigating backgrounds, but poorly trained lawyers don’t help juries to see this. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon deliver a decision whether "evolving standards of decency" allow for juvenile executions. Twenty-eight states have outlawed the juvenile death penalty. The mercy shown to Lee Boyd Malvo in the D.C. sniper case was important. Harsh criminalization of women is another example of the revolving door. Physical and sexual violence is a chronic problem for two thirds of them before, during and after imprisonment. A pregnant woman can be forced to undergo testing and may be imprisoned for delivering drugs to her fetus. If she is abused, she can be charged with endangerment for failing to turn in her abuser. If a woman calls police on a child abuser, she can be arraigned for failing to protect the child sooner. If someone in her family uses drugs she can be arrested for conspiracy. The threat of seeing her children placed in foster care, never to be returned, haunts the lives of abused and poor women. The "war on drugs" targets communities with the highest rates of HIV, asthma, and hypertension and the lowest paid teachers and healthcare workers. Not surprisingly, physical and mental illness afflicts prisoners at many times the rate of the general population. If drugs were decriminalized and treated as a health issue, 50% of the prison population might be free. INTERNATIONAL SILENCE? International law forbids treating prisoners in a way that compromises their humanity. The U.S. has refused to sign several conventions or covenants of the UN because they forbade the death penalty. Poignantly, one of these lists 39 principles for the treatment of prisoners including the right to housing, food, air. The UN requires periodic reports and in-country visits to monitor prisoners’ human rights. (Recently Cuba was forced to open its prisons to inspectors because of complaints by stateside Cubans.) Last year, when the U.S. submitted a report on its prisons to the UN Committee for Human Rights, no U.S. non-governmental organization submitted a shadow report or refutation of the government’s claims. What kind of pressure was brought to bear on the ACLU, Southern Center for Human Rights, Equality Now and others to keep them from submitting a "second opinion"? --January |
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