BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!
WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google
Nancy Pelosi Hasn’t Been Paying Attention
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The Progressive | There she was on The View on Monday, and Joy Behar, a good progressive, actually asked her a decent question on why she wasn’t pursuing impeachment.
Pelosi’s response was unbelievable: “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”
You’ve got to be kidding me!
For starters, Bush himself admitted that he wasn’t obeying the FISA law when he was spying on people without first getting a warrant from the FISA court as required explicitly in the statute.
Then there is the torture and kidnapping that he has countenanced. That violates U.S. statutes and treaties.
And what about the wholesale corrupting of the Justice Department, which pursued political prosecutions and illegally discriminated against prospective employees on the basis of their personal views?
Then there’s the outing of Valerie Plame, and the cover up of that outing.
And what greater crime can you commit than waging a war of aggression and lying a country into war?
The evidence on impeachment, as Dennis Kucinich has courageously and thoroughly demonstrated, is overwhelming. On Democracy Now, Kucinich responded to Pelosi’s claim.
And for a breakdown of the statutes, Constitutional articles, and treaties that Bush has violated, go to AfterDowningStreet.org, and in particular, to http://www.pubrecord.org/docs/vega/kucinich-bush-articles-of-impeachment-violations.pdf.
How much more does Nancy Pelosi need?
This is not a case of political tag or gotcha.
This is about the Constitution and the rule of law.
That Nancy Pelosi can fob it off so facilely just shows how derelict she is in her duties.
Have Your Say: Nancy Pelosi Hasn’t Been Paying Attention
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Leave it in the ground!
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
A new open cast coal mine site is about to get under way in beautiful Derbyshire unless we stop it. Lodge House site which is east of the village of Smalley and spans either side of Bell Lane, is one of seven new sites that UK Coal is to open cast.
The area is about to be devastated. Despite objections from local councils, residents and local environmental groups the Secretary of State granted planning permission in 2007. The 122 hectare site will have one million tonnes of coal ripped out over 5 years and UK Coal claims that it will be returned back to its natural state afterwards.
However residents fear there may be more to the plot, as they were excluded from parts of the planning meeting under grounds of commercial confidentiality. According to campaigners UK Coal are one of those companies that looks to maximise their profits by raping the land and profiting from it any way they can. After coal extraction, they often turn the area into business parks, housing and industrial estates. According to their website in some cases they return it to farmland and charge the farmers rent or in low grade land grow energy crops. They are apparently even into wind power, but have yet to erect a single turbine.
Coal is not clean energy and is a major contributor to climate change. With the new onslaught of proposed power stations, UK Coal are looking to cash in on climate devastation and destruction unless we stop them.
The area is rich with wildlife and backs onto Shipley County Park. Some houses, (the sort of place you dream of living in) have been shuttered up and items like toys, dog kennels and other personal bits remain looking like something from a hurried evacuation from a war zone. UK Coal has stated that the site will be returned to farm land, but they are able to expand beyond the 122 hectares without needing further planning permission.
Have Your Say: Leave it in the ground!
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
British NASA hacker to face U.S. trial
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
LONDON (Reuters) - A British computer expert faces up to 70 years in jail after losing his fight on Wednesday against extradition to the United States, where he is accused of “the biggest military hack of all time”.
Gary McKinnon was arrested in 2002 after U.S. prosecutors charged him with illegally accessing computers, including Pentagon, U.S. army, navy and NASA systems, and causing $700,000 (353,500 pounds) worth of damage.
McKinnon told Reuters in 2006 he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling large military networks for proof.
However, the House of Lords, ruled that the gravity of the alleged offences should not be understated and they would carry a maximum life sentence under English law.
McKinnon’s lawyers had argued that sending him to the United States would breach his human rights, be an abuse of the English court process and should be barred as his extradition was sought “for the purpose of prosecuting him on account of his nationality or political opinions”.
A district court ruled in May 2006 that he should be extradited, a decision upheld at London’s High Court in April 2007. But in October three of Britain’s top judges gave McKinnon permission to take his case to the House of Lords.
If found guilty in the United States, McKinnon could face up to 70 years in prison and fines of up to $1.75 million.
Using his own computer at home in London, McKinnon hacked into 97 computers belonging to and used by the U.S. government between February 2001 and March 2002.
McKinnon is accused of causing the entire U.S. Army’s Military District of Washington network of more than 2,000 computers to be shut down for 24 hours.
Using a limited 56K dial-up modem and the hacking name “Solo” he found many U.S. security systems used an insecure Microsoft Windows programme with no password protection.
He then bought off-the-shelf software and scanned military networks, saying he found expert testimonies from senior figures reporting that technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist.
At the time of his indictment, Paul McNulty, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said: “Mr McKinnon is charged with the biggest military computer hack of all time.”
Have Your Say: British NASA hacker to face U.S. trial
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
BP hits a record but warns of Russia risk
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
BP reported the biggest-ever quarterly profit for a British company but warned of the risks of doing business in Russia and promised to fight to defend its interests there.
Soaring oil and gas prices helped push underlying net profit up 56 per cent to $8.6bn (£4.3bn) in the second quarter.
Tony Hayward, the chief executive who took over last year, has been trying to turn the company round after years of disappointing performance and yesterday’s figures showed signs that his efforts may be bearing fruit.
However, BP’s shares have been under pressure because of its problems in Russia. The group is facing a bitter battle for control of TNK-BP, its joint venture owned 50-50 with the Alfa-Access-Renova group of Russian billionaires.
The shares slipped again yesterday, in spite of the better-than-expected results, and closed down 12¾p at 506¾p.
Mr Hayward said BP would “defend robustly” its rights under the shareholder agreement setting up TNK-BP and threatened legal action against AAR.
He advised other international companies looking to do business in Russia to “tread with caution”, reinforcing BP’s message that the pressure on TNK-BP from AAR and Russian authorities would damage the confidence of international investors.
Mr Hayward also said Robert Dudley, chief executive of TNK-BP, could remain at the head of the company while outside Russia only for a matter of months.
Mr Dudley left Moscow last week following AAR’s sustained campaign to remove him.
He is still running TNK-BP from an office somewhere in central Europe but Mr Hayward’s comments showed that unless Mr Dudley returns to Russia fairly soon, BP will be forced to bow to AAR’s demand that he be replaced.
BP’s quarterly profit will remain the UK’s biggest ever if, as expected, Royal Dutch Shell reports an underlying net profit of about $8.3bn tomorrow.
Production for the second quarter at BP was broadly flat compared with the same period in 2007 – at 3.83m barrels of oil equivalent per day. However, excluding the effect of production sharing contracts, which give more oil to the countries where BP operates as the price rises, underlying production was up 6 per cent.
Profits at the refining division collapsed from $2.7bn to $539m as margins were squeezed, especially in the US.
Vivienne Cox, the head of BP’s alternative energy business, including biofuels, wind and solar, said BP had talked to possible strategic partners about taking a stake and was reviewing options to “expose the value” of the unit, but had “no plans” to float it off.
BP said it would pay a dividend of 14 cents a share for the quarter, up 29 per cent from the 10.825 cents paid in the equivalent period of 2007. It has shifted away from share buy-backs and towards dividends as a way to distribute cash.
Colin Smith, analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort, said BP had a superior short-term growth outlook than Shell.
“The bears would say BP is not investing as much for the future, but it does not necessarily need to. BP is doing well right now.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Have Your Say: BP hits a record but warns of Russia risk
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Inspector questions Blackwater contracts
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
A high-stakes dispute that flared Monday between Blackwater and the federal government boils down to a definition: Are the hundreds of Blackwater guards protecting diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan employees or contractors? By labeling them contractors, Blackwater and its affiliates qualified for federal small-business contracts worth nearly $110 million.
Those contracts and others were called into question Monday when the Small Business Administration’s inspector general said Blackwater got dozens of the contracts even though the private security company may have exceeded size limits for a small business.
The audit was requested in March by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Waxman also asked that the Internal Revenue Service investigate Blackwater. If the IRS determines that Blackwater’s guards are employees, Blackwater could owe $50 million or more in unpaid Social Security and Medicare taxes, Waxman said.
The inspector general said Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., in the state’s northeastern corner, obtained 39 contracts set aside for small businesses from 2005 through 2007. Most of the money was for six aviation contracts worth $107 million that the Defense Department awarded to Presidential Airways, a sister company of Blackwater.
The inspector general’s office, which is the agency’s in-house watchdog, said it was unclear whether the contracts should be judged by revenue or employment.
The contracts were set aside for a company with less than $25.5 million in annual revenue. Blackwater has taken in more than $200 million in government contracts in each of the past three years and wouldn’t qualify.
If the standard was employment, the contract was set aside for a company with fewer than 1,500 employees. Presidential Airways said Blackwater and its affiliates had 715 employees, a number that doesn’t include security guards. According to a 2007 congressional report, Blackwater had 987 security personnel working for the U.S. State Department. The total would put the company above the 1,500-employee limit.
The inspector general cited several reasons to count the security guards as employees. Blackwater considered the guards employees for the purpose of workers’ compensation insurance. The inspector general questioned Blackwater’s claim that the company had no knowledge or control of its guards once they were in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The SBA inspector general referred the contracts to the inspectors general of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs for further investigation.
SBA report criticized
Blackwater released a statement saying it relied on the advice of experts in treating its guards as contractors and criticized the SBA’s report as inconclusive and speculative.
“We recognize that the issue of independent contractor vs. employee classification is complex,” the statement said. “If after fair and complete examination of the facts, the appropriate authorities have alternate recommendations about our worker classification, we are open to considering other options so long as we can continue to serve our government clients in the best way possible.”
The report also discussed 33 non-aviation contracts worth $2.2 million; 32 were set aside for companies with annual revenues of $6.5 million or less, and the final contract was set aside for companies with 500 or fewer employees.
Blackwater’s revenues have exceeded $200 million each of those years, according to federal data.
This “may have involved misrepresentations to obtain the contract,” the inspector general report said.
The penalties for “misrepresentation” are spelled out on the SBA’s standard form that companies must fill out to qualify as small businesses. A company that misrepresents its status as a small business can face criminal fines up to $500,000.
The government can also suspend contracts with the company or bar it from future government contracts.
Have Your Say: Inspector questions Blackwater contracts
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Al-Qaeda expert re-killed by CIA
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
legitgov.org |
It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ at the CIA!
Abu Khabab al-Masri ‘died’ in January 2006 and again on Monday. Once again, the ‘mainstream’ media announces the re-killing of another ‘key al-Qaeda operative’ by a ‘CIA-operated unpiloted drone!’ These top al-Qaeda operatives - and their subsequent deaths - are more bountiful than poppy fields in Afghanistan or oil smuggling routes in Iraq.
BTW, who keeps picking up the US $5 million reward?
The Financial Times reports:
Al-Qaeda expert killed by CIA 30 July 2008 Pakistan intelligence officials yesterday confirmed a key al-Qaeda [al-CIAduh] expert on chemical and biological weapons was killed in an attack by a CIA-operated unpiloted drone, late on Sunday. Egyptian-born Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, who was also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was one of six Arab men who were killed in a remote region along the Afghan border, according to an intelligence official. The US had offered a $5m (€3.19m, £2.5m) reward for his capture. Western diplomats said it would be a boost to morale in the Bush administration, struggling with mounting troop casualties in Afghanistan and a revival of militant attacks in Iraq.
Officials: Al Qaeda’s Mad Scientist Killed –CIA Drone Targeted Chemical Weapons Expert Abu Khabab Al-Masri On Afghanistan-Pakistan Border 29 Jul 2008 One of al Qaeda’s top chemical and biological weapons experts was killed in an air strike by a CIA pilotless drone in a remote Pakistani border region, senior Pakistani intelligence officials told CBS News Tuesday morning. Intelligence officials investigating the early Monday missile attack confirmed that Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri was one of six men killed and his remains had been positively identified… The timing of the report on al-Masri’s death also aroused suspicion - coinciding with a visit to the White House by Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani. In the past week two U.S. officials, speaking on deep background, told CBS News that they expected Pakistan to overtly demonstrate its support for the U.S. fight against terrorism by assisting in the arrest or killing of an important Islamic militant, close to the time of Gilani’s Washington trip.
But, looky here!
U.S. Strike Killed Al Qaeda Bomb Maker –Terror Big Also Trained ‘Shoe Bomber,’ Moussaoui 18 Jan 2006 ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda’s master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week’s U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan. Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning. The United States had posted a $5 million reward for Mursi’s capture.
And here!
Abu Khabab al-Masri: A Master of Terror 18 Jun 2006 According to a growing number of media reports, a recent U.S. airstrike on a Pakistani border village has likely killed a senior Egyptian Al-Qaida commander named Midhat Mursi (a.k.a. Abu Khabab al-Masri). Since the late 1980s, Abu Khabab has served as a top military aide and deputy to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. Mursi was responsible for co-managing Al-Qaida’s notorious Derunta military training complex near Jalalabad, where he maintained his own elite terrorist graduate school aptly named the “Abu Khabab Camp.”
No worries. The New York Times covers for the Bush regime:
Bush Praises Pakistan Just Hours After U.S. Strike 29 Jul 2008 President [sic] Bush on Monday praised Pakistan’s commitment to fighting extremists along its deteriorating border with Afghanistan, only hours after an American missile strike destroyed what American and Pakistani officials described as a militant outpost in the region, killing at least six fighters. Mr. Bush, meeting with Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, at the White House, sought to minimize growing concerns that Pakistan’s willingness to fight extremists was waning, allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup inside Pakistan and plan new attacks there and beyond. Senior American officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just three days ago, publicly scolded Pakistan for not doing more to root out safe havens like the one bombed on Monday in Azam Warsak, a village in South Waziristan near the Afghan border. Among those believed to have been killed in the missile attack, evidently carried out by a remotely piloted aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, was an Egyptian identified as a senior Qaeda trainer and weapons expert, according to residents and officials in the area, as well as American officials. Neither the operative’s identity nor that of the others has been confirmed. The officials spoke anonymously because of the political and diplomatic sensitivities of attacking targets in Pakistan. The Egyptian operative, Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, appears on the State Department’s list of 37 most-wanted terrorists, with a reward of $5 million for his capture… He was falsely reported to have been killed in a similar attack in January 2006 in news accounts that attributed the claim to Pakistani officials. The timing of Monday’s strike, the latest in a series by remotely piloted American aircraft inside Pakistan, coincided with the first official visit by Mr. Gilani to the United States.
Have Your Say: Al-Qaeda expert re-killed by CIA
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Afghan air war grows in intensity
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
WASHINGTON - Daily airstrikes by U.S. and allied fighter-bombers in Afghanistan have almost doubled since last summer, according to U.S. Air Force data, a trend that reflects increased insurgent attacks but also raises concerns about civilian casualties.
The growing reliance on airstrikes by U.S. commanders in Afghanistan appears to mark a turn in the course of the war.
Responding to requests from ground commanders, allied aircraft over the past week have pummeled enemy ground targets an average of 68 times a day across Afghanistan, dropping 500- and 2,000-pound guided bombs and strafing enemy forces with cannon fire, according to Air Force daily strike reports.
A year ago, the Air Force was recording about 35 airstrikes per day in Afghanistan.
Although the Air Force takes what it says are exhaustive measures to avoid accidental deaths, civilian casualties from airstrikes have spiked twice this year, from none in January to 23 in March to 60 so far this month, according to new, unpublished data from Human Rights Watch researcher Marc Garlasco, a former targeting chief for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
Taliban-led insurgents are attacking in significant numbers and staying to fight rather than engaging in traditional hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, according to U.S. commanders.
In several recent incidents, U.S. and allied troops prevailed in pitched battles only after fighter-bombers showed up to blast the insurgents.
The growing role of air power suggests that the war will require more than the additional troops recommended by President Bush and both presidential candidates. It might require more manned and unmanned aircraft from an already overstretched Air Force and Navy.
And greater use of air power would likely result in more civilian casualties, in a conflict in which winning local loyalty is considered the key to success.
Last fall, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, responding to the rising civilian death toll from airstrikes, publicly demanded that the United States find an alternative. But airstrikes only increased.
Allied commanders are still investigating a July 6 airstrike that the Afghan government says killed 47 civilians on their way to a wedding.
“We deeply regret any incident where civilians are harmed,” said Royal Navy Capt. Mike Finney, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan.
Enemy ‘emboldened’
But the Air Force says it is only responding to the intensity of fighting on the ground.
“Let’s face it, the enemy is more emboldened,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. Douglas L. Raaberg, deputy commander of air operations in the region. Raaberg is a B-1 bomber pilot who has flown strike missions over Afghanistan as recently as last week.
“The Taliban, when they have an opportunity to take a stand, they are doing that,” he said in a telephone interview from the region.
Coalition aircraft have doubled the number of hours they spend each day on airborne “armed overwatch” of U.S. and allied convoys and other operations, he said. He acknowledged that strike missions also have doubled as ground commanders increasingly request air support.
To meet the demand, allied air crews are flying more sorties each day, and more U.S. aircraft are on station with the recent diversion of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln from Iraq operations to supporting operations in Afghanistan.
“We are shifting assets as needed to make sure we don’t leave [ground forces] uncovered,” Raaberg said.
But the Air Force has to scramble to meet unexpected demand.
A Taliban attack July 13, for example, nearly overran a remote U.S. and Afghan outpost near the Pakistani border. Insurgents held the upper hand in combat until an Air Force B-1 bomber flew in to drop 2,000-pound bombs, an unmanned Predator fired a Hellfire missile and other strike aircraft dropped bombs and strafed the enemy with cannon. The insurgents retreated, leaving nine American soldiers dead.
“The only reason they weren’t completely overrun was air power, and that’s the first time that has happened” in the Afghan war, said John McCreary, who retired in 2006 as a senior intelligence analyst for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.
“Coalition ground forces are not winning every battle, but they are winning every battle where they have air support,” said McCreary, who follows Afghanistan closely and still assembles a daily open-source intelligence report.
On July 20, Raaberg was piloting a B-1 bomber over Afghanistan when he was redirected to attack Taliban forces gathering for an assault on a U.S. forward operating base in Kunar province, in eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan.
“They started attacking within half an hour of when I got there,” Raaberg recalled. He said U.S. artillery fired at the enemy, followed by airstrikes, followed by more artillery and more airstrikes, “until we ran out of bombs.”
Defeating such Taliban attacks, he said, is “not so much air [power] saving the day, it’s air combined with ground forces combined with our coalition partners. We’re trying to use everything.”
Analysts who have studied casualty patterns in Afghanistan say that the vast majority are caused, deliberately or not, by the Taliban and other insurgents.
According to Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan international research organization, 929 Afghan civilians were killed in the fighting in 2006. Of those, 699 were killed by the Taliban and 230 by U.S. or coalition forces, including 116 by airstrikes.
In 2007, 1,633 Afghan civilians died in the fighting, with 950 killed by the Taliban and 434 by U.S. and coalition forces, according to data provided by Garlasco. The rest died under unclear or unknown circumstances, he said.
But while the number killed by U.S. or coalition ground forces stayed about the same, those killed by airstrikes more than doubled, to 321.
A key reason for the increase is that the Taliban are “shielding” their fighters among Afghanistan’s civilian population, Garlasco said.
“They actually go into peoples’ homes, force them to stay there during a battle, force them to build defensive trenches for them - these are true Geneva Conventions violations,” Garlasco said.
Raaberg said the Air Force will not attack insurgents shielding themselves among civilians “and the enemy knows that.”
Unplanned strikes
But Garlasco said the Air Force has not taken as much care with its quick-reaction airstrike missions as it has with those planned in detail and reviewed by intelligence analysts and lawyers at the U.S. regional air operations headquarters in Qatar.
“In their planned airstrikes, they have virtually eliminated the danger of civilian casualties,” Garlasco said. “It is in the unplanned airstrikes that you’re seeing almost all of the civilian casualties.”
Such unplanned missions often involve urgent calls to support U.S. and allied troops who unexpectedly engage in battle. Or an unmanned surveillance plane might find a group of people mistakenly identified by targeters as insurgents.
Raaberg said that for unplanned missions - such as the one in which he participated July 20 - the air command dispatches not just strike aircraft but intelligence and command aircraft, all in close coordination with ground commanders and tactical air controllers.
“It’s a painstaking effort,” he said. If insurgents are mixed in with civilians, “we will wait them out if we can” or ask the ground commander to flush them out.
But U.S. and allied troops in trouble take precedence.
“My hat’s off to the ones on the ground,” Raaberg said.
“There’s nothing more uncomfortable than to hear on the radio mortars and grenades going off. You’ve got to go help them.”
Have Your Say: Afghan air war grows in intensity
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Strike on Iran still possible, U.S. tells Israel
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
LA Times | WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials reassured Israel’s defense minister this week that the United States has not abandoned all possibility of a military attack on Iran, despite widespread Israeli concern that Washington has begun softening its position toward Tehran.
In meetings Monday and Tuesday, administration officials told Defense Minister Ehud Barak that the option of attacking Iran over its nuclear program remains on the table, though U.S. officials are primarily seeking a diplomatic solution.
At the same time, U.S. officials acknowledged that there is a rare divergence in the U.S. and Israeli approaches, with Israelis emphasizing the possibility of a military response out of concern that Tehran may soon have the know-how for building a nuclear bomb.
“Is there a difference of emphasis? It certainly looks as though there is,” said a senior American Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the sensitive talks.
U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of building nuclear weapons.
Tehran says that it is engaged in a peaceful enrichment program for civilian energy purposes.
Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in an interview that U.S. officials have often made it clear to Israeli officials that Washington prefers to try to mitigate the threat from Tehran by applying economic pressure.
“The military option, although always available, is not our preferred route,” Morrell said.
“We have made that point clear to them and the world in our public statements and private meetings.”
Barak left Israel for Washington amid reports in the Israeli press that he would try to talk the Bush administration out of what many Israelis perceive as a more conciliatory policy toward Iran.
On Tuesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Barak had told Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that “a policy that consists of keeping all options on the table must be maintained.”
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Barak said that there remains time for “accelerated sanctions” to try to persuade Iran to abandon the nuclear program.
Israeli officials were concerned in December when a key U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had abandoned an effort to build a nuclear bomb. They also have noted with concern comments this month by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that an Israeli airstrike on Iran would further destabilize the Middle East and compound the strain on overworked U.S. forces.
Also this month, in a rare move toward engagement with Tehran, a senior U.S. diplomat took part in international talks in Geneva about the nuclear program.
And U.S. officials have floated a proposal for opening a low-level diplomatic office in Tehran.
These gestures have taken place at a time of intensifying discussion in Israel about the wisdom of an Israeli military attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office.
A senior State Department official said Tuesday that Israel “is a sovereign state and we understand that they view this as an existential threat. And we take the threat that’s posed by Iran seriously as well.”
But the official, who asked to remain unidentified in keeping with diplomatic rules, said the administration is “pursuing the strategy we believe is the right one.”
Gates, in an hourlong meeting with Barak, told the minister that the United States intends to consider providing radar to Israel that can detect ballistic missiles launched from Iran and supplying weapons to counter rocket attacks from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, according to a senior Defense official.
Have Your Say: Strike on Iran still possible, U.S. tells Israel
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Reversing mass imprisonment
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.
For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.
There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.
Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.
***
The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.
The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.
Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.
Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.
So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.
More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?
***
We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today’s mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.
As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.
The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and ’90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.
Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.
The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in “correctional investment”—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.
***
Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies would it promote?
There are small signs of change in the public conversation about crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one answer to Senator Webb’s question about the future of punishment in America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and faith-based prison programs.
Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis writes: “The reality of mass incarceration translates into the reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote reintegration, not retribution.” Here the reentry movement challenges mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation, but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.
If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration, prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners’ preparation for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men and women coming out of prison—most in their thirties or older—have never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as “non-cognitive skills.” While education programs in prison can help develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that enables a return to mainstream social life.
Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO’s transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.
CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a control group composed of former inmates who received job-search assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work. Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention, immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.
CEO’s method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program might operate. Charles “Joe” Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.
The meetings were run by Hynes’s energetic First Assistant District Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not see the D.A.’s role as simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn’s criminal defendants. In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with strengthening neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad sense. The community meetings in Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods were Gatling’s effort to replenish the area’s flagging social capital—the web of networks and supports that greases the wheels of social life. After a few years, Hynes hired a full-time social worker and developed his own prisoner reentry program. At first it operated only in a few precincts with high parole caseloads, but later it spread across the whole borough.
Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together), the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for $7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely to be employed.
A large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class.
These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First, transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third, timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job immediately out of prison.
While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested at rates of around 40 percent or more.
Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class. Instead of focusing assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited, the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls to keep them out.
***
What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work? Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like Brooklyn’s RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would move into supportive housing.
How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the 700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a program seems entirely fanciful—how could we pay for it?
One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington, D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of prison populations.
First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and other “victimless” crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and Anne Piehl—the former would become an appointee in the second Bush administration—wrote that their “best estimate of the incapacitation effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug dealer) is zero,” and they therefore “value drug crimes (sales and possession) at zero social cost.” Though the War on Drugs failed to reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and ’90s.
Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts. Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations over the last twenty years.
Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first year, the authors write, “supervision is more of a nuisance than a means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from committing another crime.”
Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and probationers are released to the community subject to a large number of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug test or missing an appointment—their reappearence behind bars may have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding a year or more to their time in prison.
Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision. Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois, New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level, eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner reentry program.
Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work, parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their communities.
***
So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.
There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration, but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums. Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration rates continue to rise.
While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban neighborhoods. These problems—disorder and addiction largely flowing from chronic idleness—set in motion the politics and policy choices that delivered mass incarceration. As America’s meager welfare state failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving the social problems of idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration contains an unruly population beset with trouble; wholesale confinement makes the population more manageable but leaves their troubles undiminished.
To expect a rehabilitative criminal justice alone to reverse mass incarceration is, in an odd way, to repeat the mistakes of the tough-on-crime movement. We would again be turning to line officers to manage the byproducts of deep social inequalities. While we might spend billions on a jobs program for former prisoners, we would still send them out to look for work in labor markets where half of the young men are jobless. We would still be asking them to stay sober amid a thriving street trade in illegal drugs. This is what prisoners mean when they say they are set up to fail. This is not just a recidivist’s special pleading: it reflects the deficiencies of a theory in which society’s losers have only themselves to blame.
The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving social problems, but their only tools were the powers of arrest and imprisonment.
Reversing mass incarceration will ultimately require that social problems be solved with social policies. The two most urgent priorities are the prevention of school dropout and the creation of a viable and legitimate economy in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Not even the most rehabilitative criminal justice policy can solve these problems. We normally think of education and employment as sources of economic opportunity. In the era of mass incarceration, we also see that they are positive sources of social control, providing order in people’s daily lives.
School failure and joblessness, of course, lie deep at the core of American urban inequality. Even if our policy knowledge is equal to these problems, the political will is weak, especially since carceral stigma now clouds the neighborhoods of the urban poor. It seems unlikely under these conditions that communities of concentrated poverty will somehow launch new programs of urban renewal or that middle class voters will discover sympathies for the poor. Are new efforts at social investment impossible?
The upcoming election season holds more promise for an expanded social policy than we have seen in years. The coming debate over national health insurance holds enormous significance for communities most affected by mass incarceration. If a plan emerges that covers treatment for substance abuse, mental health problems, and chronic disease, and if the plan is truly universal, carrying no exclusions for those in prison or with felony convictions, it can significantly improve the lives of those entangled in the penal system. By aiming to cover everyone, national health insurance creates a common cause between the urban poor wracked by mass incarceration and the suburban middle class. We have recently seen this kind of cross-class support in defense of Social Security—a universalistic and venerated institution operating with great anti-poverty effect. Supporters repelled the threat of privatization not because Social Security slashes poverty among the elderly, but because it guarantees the material dignity of all citizens in retirement.
Policies narrowly tailored only to the needs of released prisoners can at best attract the support of altruists and the poor themselves. The ineffectiveness of these constituencies is reflected in the quality of these targeted policies as they currently stand. But by actively constructing the common citizenship of the poor and the middle class, a universal social policy provides a powerful force for social integration.
***
Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.
Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.
Clearly we are not there yet. The norms of good citizenship, however, develop in tandem with the institutions of civic life. Political will can grow in small increments led by the promotion of institutions that provide on the basis of Marshall’s “basic human equality.” Such a renewal of an authentically American social citizenship would sweep away the jobless ghetto and the mass incarceration that it has spawned.
Have Your Say: Reversing mass imprisonment
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
‘All Citizens Must Be Equal’
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Guardian | “When we’re inside Sadaka Reut, I believe that everyone is good to each other,” said Lena, describing her Arab-Israeli summer camp. “But then we go out on to the street, and it’s [a different story] …”
Seconds later, her point was proved perfectly. On a busy intersection in the heart of Yafo, a middle-aged man cast a disapproving eye over the street exhibition the group were displaying. “What’s this?”, he asked with a caustic twang to his voice. “It’s a Jewish-Arab project …” began one of the organisers, but the man had heard enough. Sticking two fingers in the leader’s face, he spat “Fuck you,” and stormed off.
The theme of this year’s camp is “The Untold Story”, so the presentation contained some uncomfortable truths. Testimonies of residents who lived in Yafo during the War of Independence in 1948 were pinned to large boards alongside poetry, photography and cartoons depicting the plight of those who were expelled from their homes. Passersby were encouraged by the teenage participants to recount their own memories on camera, while others were handed flyers. Hostility abounded in the heat of the midday sun, but there were small pockets of approval from both Jewish and Arab onlookers. According to 17-year-old Hadas, however, whether the public approved or disapproved was beside the point.
“It’s not important if their reaction is positive or negative – it’s about getting their feelings to come out. We’re not here to force people to change their minds and [dictate] what is right and wrong. There are many grey areas; we [Jewish Israelis] have good guys and bad guys, and so do they.”
For the 50 youths taking part in the camp, listening to each others’ stories and personal experiences was the essence of the programme, according to Adi, one of Sadaka Reut’s movement workers. “Jews can go through their whole life [in Israel] and never meet a Palestinian,” she said, “so the camp is very eye-opening for them. For the Palestinians, it’s slightly different, since they are forced to see the Jewish side every day, but on the camp we try to create a balanced environment in which they can meet [their Jewish peers].”
“People are ignorant, and they prefer their ignorance to knowledge,” said Ismail, whose family has lived in Yafo for nine generations. This was his third summer spent with Sadaka Reut. “My parents are moderate and very supportive of me taking part, and my sister’s politics are the same as mine, so we got into this group together.”
Ismail and Lena hold strikingly similar visions for the future in their country, with both stressing the need for equality to prevail over religious or sectarian supremacism. “It has to be democratic for both peoples,” said Lena. “Everyone must be treated the same, and no one group can be treated better than others.”
“All citizens must be equal,” agreed Ismail. “It doesn’t need to be a Jewish state; nor must preference be given to the Jewish people. It just needs to be our country; [a country belonging to both Jews and Arabs].”
Listening to the participants talk was like watching a new generation of politicians forging their manifestos in the furnace of youthful idealism; however, I asked one of the leaders, was this handful of teenagers enough reason to hope that a sea change could occur? “If we lose all hope, there is nothing more to be done,” replied Sama. “There is no change without hope. And if we start with teenagers, that’s where we can have the most effect. Just watching their interaction with one another is the change we are trying to make”.
But for all the enthusiasm of the campers and their leaders, the bigger picture tells a different story when it comes to spreading Sadaka Reut’s message on a national scale. The state refuses to fund the organisations’s activities, “because we are not a Zionist youth movement,” noted Fadi Shbita, Sadaka Reut’s director. Whilst they do not support Zionism, nevertheless there is no particular political agenda being pushed, he said.
“We don’t advocate policies such as where to draw borders, and so on,” explained Fadi. “All we say is that both people have rights here, and that they need to be treated equally.” A view which seems pretty inoffensive, yet is reason enough for the authorities not to allocate them a penny of the annual 66 million shekel budget set aside for youth movements.
Despite the frosty reception Sadaka Reut engenders amongst Israeli officialdom, as well as on the Israeli street, Fadi is not entirely disheartened. “On one hand, I am optimistic”, he said, “but on the other hand, it’s going to be a very long process [to effect real change in Israeli society]. In the meantime, we can create more and more young activists, at least”.
On the strength of those I met during the street exhibition, he and his team have clearly succeeded on that front. And for all the opposition they encounter when taking their message to the public, the participants themselves are building bridges far more resilient than can be toppled by any number of expletives hurled their way by their detractors.
Have Your Say: ‘All Citizens Must Be Equal’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Bush Reveals True Reason for War in Push for Iraqi Agreement
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Huffington Post | For five years the Bush administration has played wack-a-mole with the American people as to why we are in Iraq, with a new justification quickly spawning after the hollow core of the prior position was exposed. WMD’s was followed by fighting Al Qaeda and ultimately bringing democracy to the Middle East. Last week the proverbial mole may have met his maker and exposed the true reason over a million Americans have been put in harm’s way.
In May 2004, President Bush explained that our mission in Iraq was “to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations.” A week into his second term, Bush said he would “absolutely” honor any request for withdrawal of U.S. troops by a sovereign Iraqi government, only to then ignore multiple request over the next three years and polls showing near unanimous support among Iraqi’s for a timeline for withdrawal.
All this was laid bare this month as the Iraqi government went on the offensive in its call for U.S. withdrawal by 2010. Far from embracing the desires of a sovereign Iraq, the White House instead feebly attempted to claim Prime Minister Maliki’s statement was mistranslated, while the McCain camp argued that Iraqi’s really want the U.S. to stay until 2020. Apparently their view of a “free Iraq” is an Iraq that is free to do what we tell them to do.
The Iraqi demand for a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops comes in the context of ongoing negotiations with the U.S. over a Status of Forces (SoF) Agreement in which the White House is seeking to define its legacy through (i) an indefinite occupation; (ii) more than 50 permanent bases (including five mega-bases); (iii) the unlimited ability to pursue the “war on terror” in Iraq (including ability to arrest Iraqis without consulting government); (iv) control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet; (v) supervision of Iraq’s defense, interior and national security ministries for ten years; and (vi) immunity for U.S. forces and contractors. In addition, the U.S. wants the right to unilaterally determine whether an act by another country (i.e., Iran) constitutes a “threat” to Iraq and respond as it deems fit in order to “protect” Iraq.
The Iraqi’s have rejected this invitation to be an American colony as “arrogant” and an affront to their sovereignty, but the White House is playing hardball and recently cost the Iraqi’s $5 billion by blocking the transfer of certain Iraqi currency reserves out of the declining dollar.
From the start of the occupation, the Bush administration has shown little regard for Iraqi sovereignty and international legal prohibitions against making significant changes to the legal and political institutions of an occupied country. Instead, the administration pursued what, former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz characterized as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world,” as it completely reshaped Iraq’s legal and economic regime to turn it into a Club Med for corporate interests.
The shock therapy was administered by Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority, through 100 separate Orders which suspended all tariffs and import fees (Order 12); immunized foreign contractors (Order 17); calls for the sale of 200 state owned enterprises through 40-year ownership licenses (Order 39); allowed foreign corporations to fully own Iraqi businesses and remove profits tax free (Order 39); cut corporate income taxes by two-thirds through a 15 percent flat tax (Order 49) and even restricts Iraqi farmers from using certain seeds without paying a license fee to seed suppliers such as Monsanto (Order 81).
The Bush administration also has ignored Congressional restrictions on the use of government funds “to exercise United States control over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq,” as the State Department recently assisted the Big 5 oil companies in winning rights to develop some of Iraq’s largest oilfields. Soon they will join Halliburton and others who have made billions off the war while protected by our troops.
The current spat over the SoF Agreement once again raises the question of why we fought this war to begin with. After five years of war at a cost of approximately $539 billion, 90,000 Iraqi lives, over 35,000 American soldiers wounded or killed, we now know what we suspected all along — that Operation Iraqi Freedom was never about liberating the people of Iraq but instead about liberating its assets for foreign exploitation. Naomi Klein was right four years ago when she described the Bush mission as “pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia.”
That is why with or without the SoF Agreement, Bush’s legacy is secure. The hollow echo of Operation Iraqi Freedom reminds us that while other presidents may have failed the American people in one way or another, no president has failed, deceived or betrayed the American people like George W. Bush.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
Have Your Say: Bush Reveals True Reason for War in Push for Iraqi Agreement
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .
Related News
- It’s Conyers’s Time to Act on Impeachment
- The Cover-up of the Impeachment Coverage
- Impeachment is on the table
- Pelosi and Harman Aided and Abetted 9/11 Cover Up
- Kucinich: impeachment will be heard Friday
Loading ...
Email This Page To A Friend
- Susan Klebold The Columbine Essay - O Magazine
- ID card officials back away from scandal-hit database
- Refugees Increasingly Being Refused Asylum
- Police in Wales have taken DNA samples from more than 55,000 innocent people
- BBC Pays Google For Internet Marketing
- Freedom of Information Act Cost BBC £3m
- U.S. Extends Blackwater Task In Iraq
- District 9 Hits UK
- Internet Marketing - 7 Future Proofing SEO Tips
- Stop the War Coalition: Conspiracy Groups Distraction At Best, Antisemitic At Worst
- News To Your Inbox
- Join The RINF Forum
- Twitter - RINF Forum
- Twitter - Main Newswire
- Add To My Yahoo
- Add To Google
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
Hotels Morecambe
Web Hosting Reviews
Log Splitter
Home based business opportunities
Find Office Chairs
WoW guide reviews
Get Ghillie Suits
Best weight loss pills
Online Dating