Group rallies for Toledo anti-gang march July 27, 2014
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Shooting Stars-Anti-Gang Community Outreach Program November 4, 2008
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Inflammatory Meet The Press Guest Uses Michael Brown Shooting To Mislead On Criminal Justice Racism by Timothy Johnson August 17, 2014
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National Review Online contributor Heather Mac Donald falsely said there is no evidence "that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison or arrest statistics is a result of criminal justice racism," while on NBC's Meet the Press. In fact, studies have found "conclusively" that disproportionate incarceration for African Americans is attributed to "racial bias."
Mac Donald has a history of racially inflammatory comments, including claiming that young African-American males have a "lack of self-discipline"; that it is "common sense that black students are more likely to be disruptive" than white students; and that black men possess a "lack of impulse control that results in ... mindless violence on the streets."
Still, the August 17 edition of Meet the Press turned to Mac Donald to discuss fallout from the fatal shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO. In a taped segment, Deadspin.com's Greg Howard argued that "It's physically easier for a police officer to weigh what a black man's life is worth and to end up feeling that he is justified in pulling the trigger." Mac Donald was then presented as a counterpoint, to claim there is no evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system:
MAC DONALD: The criminology profession has been trying for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison or in arrest statistics is a result of criminal justice racism. It is black crime rates that predict the presence of blacks in the criminal justice system, not some miscarriage of justice.
Due to a lack of information from local authorities it is still unclear what, if any, crime the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown believed Brown was committing, and whether such use of force was a necessary or appropriate response. However, research indicates that nationally, African-Americans are arrested and incarnated at rates that cannot be explained by crime rates.
For example, a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union found that even though African-Americans and whites use marijuana at approximately the same rate, African-Americans are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. ACLU found that in some communities, African-Americans were arrested for possession 30 times more often.
Research from Human Rights Watch also found that African-Americans were disproportionately arrested on drug charges "in every year from 1980 through 2007":
3. MYTH. JUSTICE IS APPLIED EQUALLY. REALITY: Crime prevention and enforcement policies target people of color disproportionately. BLACKS WERE ARRESTED ON DRUG CHARGES 2.8 TO 5.5 TIMES HIGHER THAN WHITES IN EVERY YEAR FROM 1980 THROUGH 2007.
The trend holds true for juvenile arrests as well. According to Rebuild the Dream President Van Jones, Department of Justice statistics indicate that "African American youth arrest rates for drug violations, assaults and weapon offenses are higher than arrest rates for white youth -- even though both report similar rates of delinquency."
Numerous studies have found that African-Americans are sentenced to longer prison terms compared to whites when committing the same crime. According to a 2012 study by law professors at University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Harvard University, the sentencing discrepancies can "conclusively" be attributed to "racial bias."
Marc Lamont Hill slaps down Bill Clinton's arguments hard after his #BlackLivesMatter meltdown By Frank Vyan Walton Apr 08, 2016
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As we all know Bill Clinton completely lost his cool when confronted by #BLM over the consequences his 90’s crime bill. So far many of the pro-Clinton arguments have been that Bernie Sanders also supported the bill and voted for it to claim that it was responsible for the major drop in crime that has occurred since that time. President Clinton himself argued in support of his wife Secretary Clinton ‘Super-predators” using two egregious strawmen, 1) that the bill was focused on inner-city drug kingpins who used 13-year-olds as their murderous foot soldiers instead to massively incarcerating thousands of non-violent low-level drug offenders for decades longer than whites who were caught with the exact same amount of drugs by a 100-to-1 disparity and 2) that anyone who complains about that fact really doesn’t care about dead black kids who haven’t been killed by cops.
Well, Mark Lamont Hill expertly shut all that bullcrap down today on CNN when debating a particularly noxious surrogate for Bill’s point of view Heather MacDonald. [No, She’s not from wife’s campaign from what I can tell.].
Just to level set, this is what we’re really talking about.
Congress did a serious injustice when it imposed much tougher penalties on defendants convicted of selling the crack form of cocaine — the kind most often used in impoverished, minority communities — than on those caught selling the powdered form of the drug that is popular with more upscale users.
In what’s known as the 100-to-1 rule, federal law mandates a 10-year sentence for anyone caught with 50 grams of crack, about the weight of a candy bar. To get a comparable sentence, a dealer selling powdered cocaine would have to be caught with 5,000 grams, enough to fill a briefcase.
The federal crack statute was passed during the height of the so-called crack epidemic of the 1980s, when it was widely, but mistakenly, believed that the crack form of the drug was more dangerous than the chemically identical powdered form. Congress compounded the inequity by making crack cocaine the only drug that carries a mandatory minimum sentence for possession, even for first-time offenders. Laws that were supposed to focus federal efforts on locking up drug kingpins have swamped federal courts with small-time cases, many involving couriers and street-corner sellers.
The United States Sentencing Commission, the bipartisan body that sets guidelines for federal prison sentences, urged Congress to eliminate the sentencing disparity more than a decade ago. The commission recently established new guidelines that would provide more lenient sentencing for crack offenses.
Here’s how Hill responded to the claim that the Crime Bill fostered the kind of police success we saw in New York using statistical methods such as CompStat.
Hill: But the crime bill wasn’t about a policing revolution of information, it was about police revolution of aggressive policing, over-incarceration, draconian sentencing, and racial disparate treatment, that was the issue here. And yes, we should address black people who kill black people, that’s not the point. We’re not out here protesting black people who kill black people all the time because I don’t have the same expectation for the Bloods and Crips as I do police. I expect police to NOT shoot me. I expect police not to be the judge, jury and executioner on the open street. I expect politicians to engage in humane public policy making and that’s not what has happened. And that’s where Hillary Clinton must be held responsible.
Once again, not to avoid responsibility and make it look like any black person that criticizes her somehow doesn’t care about safety or crime in the community is another irresponsible and dishonest move by the Clinton’s that I find so profoundly frustrating.
Which I think speaks for me quite well. In full disclosure I supported the Clinton Crime Bill which included the assault weapons ban and his 100,000 Cops initiative. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, it just didn’t work out as planned.
Following Hill’s statement MacDonald attempted to make the claim that…
The representation of blacks in prison is due to crime rates, there is not disparate treatment in the criminal justice system. Police go where the crime is, they wish they didn’t need to go into these neighborhoods but they there to save lives not to oppress people.
Which is frankly, Bullshit! And Hill responded predictably.
In 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by police 532,911 times. In 55 percent of the cases, the suspect was black and in 10 percent of the cases, the suspect was white. In 89 percent of the cases, "the suspect was innocent," said the NYCLU.
Similarly in 2011, 53 percent of New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked by police were black, and 9 percent were white. In 2010, 54 percent of New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked were black, and 9 percent were white.
Approximately 90 percent of New Yorkers who were stopped and frisked between 2010 and 2012 were "totally innocent," according to the NYCLU's analysis.
A program with a 90% failure rate really isn’t something anyone, anywhere, should be endorsing.
Further in certain neighborhoods such as Brownsville, Brooklyn the equivalent of 93% of the residents have been stopped but in reality a subset of young male blacks have been stopped over and over and over again, some as many as 20 times.
This is harassment, this IS Oppression. Text book definition.
What’s even worse is the excuse is that this is being done “protect those communities” by removing drugs and guns but even the NYPD found almost twice as many guns among the minuscule number of whites they stopped.
The NYPD and politicians have repeatedly justified the racial disparity in stop and frisks saying that they cops essentially go where the guns are, i.e. minority neighborhoods. Yet, only 1.9 percent of frisks in 2011 turned up weapons and interestingly, according to the NYCLU, “a weapon was found in only 1.8 percent of blacks and Latinos frisked, as compared to a weapon being found in 3.8 percent of whites frisked.”
And it’s not just in New York.
TABLE 13: Enforcement actions taken by police during traffic stops, by demographic characteristics of drivers, 2008 Police Stop Data from Bureau of Justice Statistics
As shown by the chart above nationwide, police stop black motorists twice as often regardless of the likelihood of having committed a driving offense. They search them three times as much yet don’t find drugs on them as often.
For years, police records have shown that black drivers tend to be less likely than white drivers to turn up with guns or drugs when searched at traffic stops. At the same time, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be subjected to these searches, according to a 2013 federal survey.
They also ticket Black drivers twice as often and resort to non-lethal uses of force against them three times more often as shown here.
TABLE 18: Contacts with police in which force was used or threatened, by demographic characteristics, 2002, 2005, and 2008 Police Use of Force
And then Police kill black men, even when they’re unarmed, about four times more often.
Estimated Rate of Arrest-Related Deaths by Homicide, 2003-09 Arrest Related Deaths by Race
There are no crime stats that support any of this, besides the fact almost everyone distorts those completely out of wack, because quite often it’s happening from the stops, to the searches, assaults and killings to people who are less likely to have done anything wrong but are being targeted anyway, which is the very definition of “disparate treatment” and when people shout about it, it certain can be annoying and frustrating to listen to. They can get on your nerves. It can make you mad and you might lash out as did Bill Clinton, even though today he seems to have “almost” apologized for it. I don’t blame him for getting upset, I get that.
But People shout this because if they don’t it seems pretty clear just about no one listens, and just about no one does anything about it. At least not yet they haven’t.
Friday, Apr 8, 2016 · 3:41:08 PM PDT · Frank Vyan Walton This is a longer version of the segment, warning — please try not to punch the screen as the Clintonite/Cop-ologist Heather McDonald is talking. You’ll just hurt your screen, and your hand.
Friday, Apr 8, 2016 · 5:59:17 PM USMST · Frank Vyan Walton More details of Bill’s “Apology”.
“Now I like and believe in protests. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t cause I engaged in some when I was a kid,” Clinton told a crowd of more than 1,000 on the campus of Penn State Behrend. “But I never thought I should drown anybody else out. And I confess, maybe it’s just a sign of old age, but it bothers me now when that happens.”
“So I did something yesterday in Philadelphia. I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as an example of the danger threatening our country,” the former president continued. [...]
“I rather vigorously defended my wife, as I am want to do, and I realized, finally, I was talking past [the protester] the way she was talking past me. We gotta stop that in this country. We gotta listen to each other again,” the former president said.
[...]
“I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television and they did. But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it,” Clinton said.
And he suggested the activists were on his side. “We can’t be fighting our friends, we got enough trouble with the people that aren’t for us,” he added, presumably referring to Republicans.
I thinks he makes, ultimately, a great point about “talking past other” — clearly his point about the crack-dealer was irrelevant to BLM’s point that Cops will stop, harass, frisk, assault and kill the dealers neighbor who has nothing to do with that guy without blinking or even recognizing their mistake.
You don’t have to be pro-drug dealer to oppose the not-dealer getting killed by cops.
I grew up in South Central, i *was* that guys neighbor and I repeated saw the police ignore them — literally drive right past them without stopping — but they would stop me, over and over again because I had a decent paying job and bought a decent looking car in that neighborhood. So I GOT THE COPS ATTENTION but the drug dealers next door didn’t. I’ve lived that, and anyone that has knows he was full of it. But I do appreciate he — kinda — knows he was full of it as he got worked up trying to defend Hillary circa 1994.
Saturday, Apr 9, 2016 · 1:43:47 AM USMST · Frank Vyan Walton
As posted in the comments Van Jones was also pretty hot about this, and has apparently been angry with Clinton since his “Sista Soldja” moment. Some of Bob Beckle’s reactions and eye-rolls are priceless.
Saturday, Apr 9, 2016 · 1:53:19 AM USMST · Frank Vyan Walton
The “Stop the Violence” movement was started in 1989 by KRS-One, as Van Jones points out they’ve been around but they get ignored. What #BLM has figured out is something they haven’t — how. to. get. coverage. And the truly sad fact, honestly, is that if they didn’t resort to lengths they have — nobody would be talking about them the same way they don’t talk about KRS-One or even the “Self-Destruction” video he wrote.
Saturday, Apr 9, 2016 · 2:01:19 AM USMST · Frank Vyan Walton
Instead of the above what we got back then was all the hysteria over Cop Killer by Bodycount. The reaction #BLM is getting now is the same one that Ice-T received back then.
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research by Ring Wing Watch April 15, 2016
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The Manhattan Institute is an increasingly prominent conservative think-tank that promotes limited government and free-market idealism. The organization has attacked minority-focused policies including affirmative action, civil rights initiatives, and immigrant support programs as obstacles to full social integration and to the benefits of the market system. The Institute heavily promotes school vouchers, saying that competition as the best way to improve public schools.
Board of Trustees: Byron R. Wien, Roger Hertog, Charles H. Brunie, Robert J. Appel, Eugene D. Brody, Christopher H. Browne, Andrew Cader, Timothy G. Dalton, Jr., Michael J. Fedak, Peter M. Flanigan, Mark Gerson, William B. Ginsberg, Maurice R. Greenberg, Fleur Harlan, H. Dale Hemmerdinger, John W. Holman, Jr., Bruce Kovner, William Kristol, Frank J. Macchiarola, Rodney W. Nichols, Edward J. Nicoll, Peggy Noonan, Joseph H. Reich, Richard Reiss, Jr., Joseph L. Rice, III, Frank E. Richardson, Robert Rosenkranz, Nathan E. Saint-Amand, MD, Andrew M. Saul, Paul E. Singer, Robert Skidelsky, Thomas W. Smith, William K. Tell, Jr., Thomas J. Tisch, Donald G. Tober, Bruce G. Wilcox, Kathryn S. Wylde.
Finances: In 2005; $17,555,461 in assets; $ 13,296,150 in revenue; $ 10,083,160 in expenses
Publications: City Journal
Affiliate Groups: An associated member of the State Policy Network, a national network of state-based right-wing organizations in 37 states as well as prominent nationwide right-wing organizations. Through its network SPN advances the public policy ideas of the expansive right-wing political movement on the state and local level.
Purpose
A think tank focused on promoting free-market principles whose mission is to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility."
Activities
• A staff of senior fellows and writers contribute to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and compose books, reviews, lectures and articles to promote the organization's views. The organization holds several high profile lecture series and policy forums and has hosted policy speeches by Bush administration officials and Republican presidential candidates.
• The Center for Civic Innovation focuses on improving the quality of life in cities by turning away from government policies and giving power to people closest to each specific problem, like parents, police, and ministers. The Center advocates for school vouchers and greater educational accountability.
• The Center for Race and Ethnicity seeks to examine prevalent issues within minority communities and criticizes relevant government policies. The Center argues that many government social programs act as barriers toward fostering a greater sense of individual responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit within minority communities.
• Many of the Center's writers attribute the socio-economic problems of the black community to an overriding sense of victimization, a reliance on government social programs, and a culture adverse to education and individualist social advancement. Accordingly, they contend that government programs such as welfare and affirmative action reinforce the community's sense of dependence and victimization.
• While many of the Center's writers do not hold an anti-immigration position, the Center opposes government programs intended to accommodate immigrant concerns, such as bi-lingual education. They argue that such policies stand in the way of Hispanic integration and deprive immigrant communities from the full benefits of America's market system.
Controversial Fellows
• Charles Murray served as a visiting fellow from 1981-1990. Murray later authored the controversial 1994 work, The Bell Curve, in which he argues that the gap between black IQ scores and white and Asian IQ scores in America cannot be explained by social factors and subsequently forwards the idea of genetic intelligence differences between races.
• Abigail Thernstrom serves as a senior fellow at the Institute. She has advanced controversial opinions about the state of American race relations and serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She was one of only two members to dissent from the Commission's eight member panel in finding evidence of racially-based election irregularities regarding the 2000 election in Florida.
Funding
Major contributors include Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lilly Endowment, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Roe Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation.
History
The Manhattan Institute originated in the late 1970s as a conservative, free-market think tank with a focus toward addressing urban social problems in New York City. Playing a large role in developing and influencing the policies of Mayor Giuliani, the organization rose to national prominence during New York City's 1990s revival as it advocated the privatization of sanitation services and infrastructure maintenance, deregulation in the area of environmental and consumer protection, school vouchers and cuts in government spending on social welfare programs. The Manhattan Institute subsequently became one of the foremost policy institutions with regard to urban social issues such crime, education, welfare, and race relations. Under the Bush Administration, the Institute has gained increased standing in a wider range of issues and has established itself as one of the preeminent conservative think-tanks, having hosted policy speeches by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in 2002 and both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney in 2006.
Quotes
• "...I want to thank the Manhattan Institute's support for pro-growth economic policies, policies that really send a clear signal that we are still the land of dreamers and doers and risk-takers." - George W Bush; New York, Jun 27, 2006
• "For twenty-five years, the Manhattan Institute has confronted old problems with fresh thinking. Many of the Institute's emblematic ideas—from the notion that low taxes encourage businesses to the concept that police should be treated with respect—were originally greeted with skepticism but have since been embraced by well-run cities everywhere. Congratulations on a quarter century of making a difference." - Rudolph W. Giuliani
• "This is a place of tremendous creativity, of original thinking, and of intellectual rigor. The scholars of the Manhattan Institute have shown, time and again, the power of good ideas to shape public policy and to have an impact on the lives of people here in New York and across the nation. You have made enormous contributions to the betterment of the city and the policy debate nationwide. The Manhattan Institute is greatly admired in the country, and rightly so. I congratulate you for building such a fine reputation, and for maintaining it over the years." - Dick Cheney; New York, Jan 16, 2006
Don't believe the fictitious crime trends used to undermine police reform. The ‘Ferguson Effect’ is part of an ugly history of using crime to delegitimize civil rights movements. That’s why we must be especially vigilant against it by Bernard Harcourt June 6, 2015
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Claims that crime has shot up because of the Ferguson protests are gaining traction, despite scanty evidence. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Pulling a page out of the conservative playbook from the 1960’s, some are arguing that America is seeing a “dramatic crime wave” as a result of the protests against police shootings in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson. But the so-called “Ferguson effect” is just the latest example of conservative crime fiction being used to undermine the recent gains of the country’s newest civil rights movement.
The causal link underlying the “Ferguson effect” is unfounded, as any honest social scientist will tell you. Given the complexity of identifying short-term crime trends and of determining reliable causal antecedents –- even with decades of hindsight and troves of big data, which is certainly not the case here -– the idea that we could observe a “Ferguson effect” on crime today is preposterous. One need only glance at the voluminous scientific controversy surrounding the massive crime drop since the early 1990s in the United States and Canada to understand this perfectly.
The point of the “Ferguson effect,” though, is not to be accurate. It is instead to distract us from the growing evidence about the magnitude and extent of police use of lethal violence in the United States -– as powerfully documented just this week by The Guardian and the Washington Post -– and to besmirch the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
It’s a strategy that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater inaugurated in his campaign in 1964, almost single-handedly turning crime into a political weapon against the civil rights movement. As Katherine Beckett shows in Making Crime Pay, the strategy coincided with a southern conservative focus on crime as a way to discredit the gains of the civil rights struggle and attract voters to the GOP.
Richard Nixon perfected this tactic during his presidency, repeatedly emphasizing, as he would in his 1968 acceptance speech, that all “we have reaped” from social programs for the urban poor is “an ugly harvest of frustrations, violence and failure.” As his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, would document in his diaries, referring to President Nixon as “P”: “P emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
Linking crime to race as a way to undermine a civil rights movement is an approach that was woven into the fabric of the law-and-order movement from that period til now. Consider arguments about the threat of juvenile “super-predators”, which William Bennett, John DiIulio and John Walters invented and defined in their 1996 book Body Count as: “the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known”. They wrote:
Based on all that we have witnessed, researched and heard from people who are close to the action, here is what we believe: America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘super-predators’ -– radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.
DiIulio would add, in another article in 1996: “as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males”.
Still today, those attempting to undo civil rights gains try to link crime to race. J Phillip Thompson shows well that the roots of “broken windows” policing –- often touted as the solution to the so-called “Ferguson effect” -– was precisely the “conservatives’ response to the civil rights movement demand for full employment in the mid-1960s.”
Back in the 60s, the language and references were more explicit. In his 1968 book Varieties of Police Behavior, James Q Wilson could, for instance, describe disorder as, among other things: “a Negro wearing a ‘conk rag’ (a piece of cloth tied around the head to hold flat hair being ‘processed’ -– that is, straightened).”
Today, people don’t use that kind of language in mainstream publications, but it is there in code –- those none-too-subtle references to race, crime and civil rights equality.
In a recent WSJ op-ed that warns of the “Ferguson effect”, we are told: “Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests”. The op-ed decries “the belief that any criminal-justice action that has a disparate impact on blacks is racially motivated.” The author suggests that recent attempts to reduce the population of black men in Wisconsin prisons may account for increased crime in Milwaukee. The op-ed quotes a police chief as saying that all this leaves “the criminal element ... feeling empowered”.
With no reliable evidence to go on other than an assortment of anecdotes and hunches, the “Ferguson effect” follows in a long line of conservative efforts to undermine racial equality.
It takes decades to undo these crime fictions. It took years to dispel the fantasy of juvenile super-predators -– with lasting effects on our juvenile justice system and devastating consequences for many youths. It would be decades before John DiIulio would recognize his myth and sign on to an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court trying to undo some of the more draconian measures. And it is only now that the myth of “broken windows” (revived again by NYPD Police Chief Bill Bratton) is starting to be recognized even by former believers as just that: an oversold tale.
Using crime to delegitimize a civil rights movement, sadly, is not new. The “Ferguson effect” has an ugly racial history.
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The Democrats’ Uneasy Connection to Private Profit Deportation Jails by Matthew Kolken March 4, 2016
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In 1996, President William Jefferson Clinton signed sweeping immigration reform legislation into law: the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” (IIRAIRA). Two of the law’s central components were the creation of mandatory detention of certain immigrants charged with criminal grounds of removal, and the establishment of a program that permits state and local law enforcement to arrest, detain and interrogate noncitizens believed to be in violation Federal immigration laws.
These two components paved the way for the expansion of the cottage industry of jailing immigrants in for-profit private prisons.
Once the 1996 law was in place, President Clinton took the advice of then senior advisor Rahm Emanuel, who devised a strategy for the President to “achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” In just two years after signing the law, the Clinton administration nearly doubled the number of immigrants held in immigration detention, and by 1998 the average number of immigrants held in deportation jails increased from 6,785 to 15,447.
Flash forward to 2009. Hillary Clinton’s “friend and mentor” former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) added language to the Department of Homeland Security’s annual spending bill that required the Federal government to “maintain a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds” at all times. This is commonly referred to as the “detention bed quota,” and needless to say the Obama administration endeavored to fill every single bed.
As the number of detained immigrants increased, a corresponding increase in the length of time it takes to process an individual through the deportation process also occurred. In many instances, it takes months for a detained immigrant to get their day in court to assert defenses to removal. Furthermore, because of mandatory detention, no immigration judge has the jurisdiction to release a detained immigrant while they are fighting their case. This has led to an annual cost of $2 billion to taxpayers, or approximately $5.5 million per day.
Not to be outdone, and rather than making good on his campaign promise to make immigration reform a top priority of his first term, President Obama appointed Emanuel as his Chief of Staff and proceeded to establish an artificial 400,000 per year deportation quota that resulted in the detention of noncitizens on a scale that has never been seen before, with the President now being labeled “the Deporter-in-Chief.”
By 2012, the private prison industry, one of the main beneficiaries of this detention strategy, had fully wrapped its tentacles around the Democratic Party—blanketing them in a mutually beneficial quid pro quo for Democratic support of policies that increased profitability. For example, Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz notoriously sided with the Corrections Corporation of America over her constituents concerning the construction of a for-profit prison to jail immigrants.
But it doesn’t end there. In 2013, Senate Democrats spearheaded new immigration reform legislation called the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.” It was sold to the American public as commonsense immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. In reality, it was designed as a windfall for the private prison industry. Moreover, the pathway to citizenship was little more than a Lucy-held football due to a series of barriers to legalization that would result in a large percentage of the undocumented population failing to achieve lawful permanent resident (green card) status, let alone citizenship, and ultimately once again facing the prospect of incarceration and deportation.
The Congressional Budget Office scored the 2013 law, estimating that it would cost $3.1 billion to detain, prosecute and incarcerate offenders from 2014 to 2023. The federal prison population was also expected to increase by 14,000 inmates annually by 2018 at a cost to taxpayers of $1.6 billion over a decade.
In 2014, the Democrats lost the Senate, and there were whispers that Republicans intended to introduce immigration reform legislation that would cure the onerous 3- and 10-year bars created in President Clinton’s law that trapped the undocumented population inside the United States, preventing legalization and subjecting them to the possibility of detention and removal. If successful, Republicans would have greatly reduced the number of individuals inside the United States unlawfully, sharply cutting into the profitability of the private prison industry, while also being cast as champions of the undocumented community in advance of the 2016 Presidential election.
When the Democrats lost the Senate, despite Republicans pleading with President Obama to wait for Congress to act, he enacted a series of executive actions that had the end result of killing any prospect of immigration reform, and further cementing the public’s perception of Republicans as obstructionists.
Now we are on the eve of the 2016 Presidential election, and the private prison industry has become a central focus of the Democratic primary, with Bernie Sanders vowing to put an end to the “private, for-profit prison racket.” Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, countered Sanders, returning the money her campaign received from the private prison industry and also making a $8,600 donation to a women’s prison charity, or roughly the equivalent of two minutes of a single speech to Wall Street bankers. What she neglected to mention is that despite the token donation, the Clinton campaign still benefits from lobbyists from the for-profit prison industry, and her policy of refusing donations only includes direct donations to her campaign, but not donations to her super PACs or State and Federal Democratic committees.
For example, before the Clinton campaign said it would no longer take money from the private prison lobby, an October 2015 VICE article reported that the campaign had received as much campaign money as Marco Rubio’s campaign from groups affiliated with private prison companies:
It is hard to predict where we will be once we have a new occupant in the White House. But what has become abundantly clear is that until we do, Democrats will continue to keep the focus on Republicans using sleight-of-hand misdirection to prevent us from discovering that when you pull back the covers, you will find a strange bedfellow cozied up next to them in the Lincoln Bedroom, and a private prison industry checkbook on the nightstand.
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Matthew Kolken is an immigration lawyer and the managing partner of Kolken & Kolken, located in Buffalo, New York. His legal opinions and analysis are regularly solicited by various news sources, including MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times, among others. You can follow him @mkolken.
Clinton To Cut Ties With Private Prison Industry by Alice Ollstein October 23, 2015
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Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, leaves the Longworth House office building at the conclusion of her testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
On Friday morning, the campaign of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton announced they will no longer accept donations from federally registered lobbyists or PACs for private prison companies.
“When we’re dealing with a mass incarceration crisis, we don’t need private industry incentives that may contribute — or have the appearance of contributing — to over-incarceration,” campaign spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa told ThinkProgress, explaining that Clinton will donate the large amount she has already received from these sources to a yet-to-be-named charity.
Hinojosa explained that the move is part of Clinton’s promise to “end the era of mass incarceration,” especially private prisons and private immigrant detention centers.
“She believes that we should not contract out this core responsibility of the federal government,” Hinojosa said. “This is only one of many ways that she believes we need to re-balance our criminal justice and immigration systems.”
Yet the decision came after months of pressure from civil rights and immigrant justice groups, who launched online petitions and interrupted Clinton’s public events, demanding she cut ties with the private prison industry.
“Our message was, ‘You can’t be pro-immigrant and still have this blemish on your record,'” said Zenén Jaimes Pérez with United We Dream, one of many organizations that teamed up to press Clinton. “She had [campaign donation] bundlers who worked for the Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, which run most of the immigrant detention centers in this country. For me, it was a big deal, because my dad was detained in a Geo facility. She was taking money from a group profiting from my family’s suffering.”
She was taking money from a group profiting from my family’s suffering.
Activists are still concerned however, that Clinton has not yet released a criminal justice reform plan, though she has said one is currently in the works. Pérez told ThinkProgress he hopes the plan specifically addresses mandatory incarceration minimums for immigration-related civil violations, such as crossing the border without authorization. Black Lives Matter has also met multiple times with the Clinton campaign to demand reforms that address mass incarceration and police violence.
In September, Clinton’s 2016 rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill to ban the federal government from awarding contracts to private prisons, saying, “Private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.” Sanders cited studies showing that private prisons, because of their profit motive, have an incentive to spend as little as possible on inmate care and rehabilitation. These companies also routinely pressure lawmakers to pass bills that will guarantee them more inmates by criminalizing low-level offenses.
Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who is challenging Sanders and Clinton for the party’s nomination, has also called for the end of federal private prison contracts.
Following Clinton’s announcement, activists are turning their attention to other 2016 candidates.
“Now it’s time for the presidential candidates who still accept private prison money to follow suit and commit to a future where no one is imprisoned for profit,” said Matt Nelson with the Latino civil rights group Presente.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is perhaps the industry’s favorite, as many of the largest for-profit prison companies are headquartered in his home state. Rubio has received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from private prison companies, going back to his time in the Florida legislature, and has hired consultants and staffers who used to work for these companies. During that time, he also steered a $110 million state contract to Geo Group.
As his prospects in the race for the GOP nomination improve, Rubio has been distancing himself from his own past proposals for immigration reform.
Private Prison Lobbyists Are Raising Cash for Hillary Clinton by Lee Fang July 23, 2015
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As immigration and incarceration issues become central to the 2016 presidential campaign, lobbyists for two major prison companies are serving as top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton.
Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group could both see their fortunes turning if there are fewer people to lock up in the future.
Last week, Clinton and other candidates revealed a number of lobbyists who are serving as “bundlers” for their campaigns. Bundlers collect contributions on behalf of a campaign, and are often rewarded with special favors, such as access to the candidate.
Richard Sullivan, of the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel, is a bundler for the Clinton campaign, bringing in $44,859 in contributions in a few short months. Sullivan is also a registered lobbyist for the Geo Group, a company that operates a number of jails, including immigrant detention centers, for profit.
As we reported yesterday, fully five Clinton bundlers work for the lobbying and law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in America, paid Akin Gump $240,000 in lobbying fees last year. The firm also serves as a law firm for the prison giant, representing the company in court.
Akin Gump lobbyist and Clinton bundler Brian Popper disclosed that he previously helped CCA defeat efforts to compel private prisons to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Hillary Clinton has a complicated history with incarceration. As first lady, she championed efforts to get tough on crime.“We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Clinton said in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added.
Just desert advocates promoted the use of punitive laws, policies, and practices in the juvenile justice system, including three-strike laws, determinate sentences, longer sentences, sentencing to boot camps, electronic monitoring, drug testing, shock incarceration, and other punitive measures (Howell, 2003b). Such policies and practices, which deemphasize prevention of juvenile crime and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders, became common in the juvenile justice system through new state legislation. Together, DiIulio’s superpredator concept and just desert principles spawned a major myth that the juvenile justice system could not be effective with the new breed of juvenile offenders and was no longer relevant in modern-day crime control (Box 1.2).
In recent months, Clinton has tacked left in some ways, and now calls for alternatives to incarceration and for greater police accountability. And while Clinton has backed a path to citizenship for undocumented people in America, she recently signaled a willingness to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” a move that could lead to more immigrant detentions.
The future of both criminal justice reform and immigration are critical for private prison firms. The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be “adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.”
