by Gregory Shank*

One of the longest-serving Social Justice editorial board members has passed away. Julia Rosalind Schwendinger died at the age of 87 on October 17, 2013, in Hudson, Florida. The daughter of Russian immigrants Jacob and Lena Pliskin Siegel, she was born on September 3, 1926, and grew up on 84th Drive in Jamaica and in the Rockaway Beach area of the New York City borough of Queens. Julia and her husband of nearly 68 years, Herman “Hi” Schwendinger, were inseparable. They helped each other get through college in the years just after World War II by teaching square dancing to teenagers. Julia played the piano and Hi called the moves. A fellow folk dancer and friend, the late Irwin Silber, could be found at Saturday night square dances at Furriers Union Hall on New York City’s West 28th Street in the late 1940s. The People’s Songs/Artists movement spearheaded by Silber and Pete Seeger promoted the music of the American labor movement and raised funds for movement activities. Folksay and People’s Songs, which were affiliated with the American Youth for Democracy, sponsored square dances featuring politically themed calls and folk plays; its publication Sing Out highlighted storied American music treasures such as Woodie Guthrie, who deeply influenced the young Bob Dylan. In 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s inquisitors deemed this music-making, dancing, and theater to be communist-inspired efforts to “control youth groups.”

Julia earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Queen’s College (1947), a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University (1950), and a doctorate in the School of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley (1975). Her dissertation, entitled The Rape Victim and the Criminal Justice System, was intimately connected with her work in founding the first anti-rape group in the United States, which arguably became the model for such work internationally. Julia and Hi became a formidable presence in the fledgling radical criminology movement of the 1970s, as well as in the struggle for women’s rights, and continued to make meaningful contributions throughout the following decades. Julia accomplished this despite a long-term struggle with life-threatening cancer, which was first manifested in the early 1970s.

Julia was consistently an activist-scholar. She opposed the Vietnam War, supported the Civil Rights Movement, and, most recently, the Occupy Movement. In her first social work position, she worked with children and teens in a poor high-crime community. Given Hi’s youthful involvement in gang activity in New York City and his early fieldwork with street gangs as a social group worker, their interests meshed well. That experience and their firsthand knowledge was invaluable in their seminal ethnographic work on adolescent social types and delinquent gangs, which Julia and Hi began while associated with the sociology department at UCLA in the early 1960s. Her community orientation and organizing skills were also apparent in the founding of the Bay Area Women Against Rape (BAWAR) in 1971, along with Oleta “Lee” Abrams. In her Rape and Inequality, Julia described the group as a tiny handful of women composed of political activists and militant feminists who saw themselves as advocates of rape victims in the established institutions. This trendsetting victim-assistance program combined scholarship with community activism, an integral element of the journal Crime and Social Justice (our inaugural title in 1974). Julia was the journal’s book review editor in the first edition and was the lead author of the landmark article “Rape Myths: In Legal, Theoretical, and Everyday Practice.” She was a meticulous editor and polished all of their coauthored writings before they could be considered ready.

Beyond her numerous academic accolades, Julia was a kind and caring mentor. Maggie Bollenbacher, an early BAWAR member, spoke of Julia’s humanity and skillfulness as a leader: “She was sharp and witty, warmhearted, and committed to her family and friends. When I joined BAWAR I was fresh out of college in Minnesota and my eyes were beginning to open to the ways of the world. My associations with Julia Schwendinger and Suzie Dod made me a much wiser and fuller person. Julia strongly influenced me through her intellectual contributions to group discussions at BAWAR meetings in the early 1970s. She offered us a better understanding of a rapist’s mentality within the context of our society. Certainly, our focus was on helping the victims and getting the work done, but Julia and women like Suzie always sought to understand why this harmful behavior was occurring in the first place. Julia pointed to the psychosocial and economic factors underlying violent behavior in America and the ways in which the criminal justice system aggravated the harm already done.” Before her death, Suzie Dod Thomas fondly recalled the inclusive spirit of the period. Although Suzie was working as a secretary at the time, Julia encouraged her to join BAWAR as well as the radical criminology movement, including participation in Crime and Social Justice. Julia and Tommie Hannigan used their BAWAR funding contacts to obtain seed money for the initial editions of the journal.

During the journal’s formative period, Julia and Hi traveled widely, visiting like-minded scholars and practitioners in England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. Many boisterous journal meetings and events such as the launching of The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove took place in the Schwendinger’s home on Vincente Avenue in North Berkeley. Julia cut a striking figure, her long black hair framing her attractive face and ready smile. Her low, smooth voice and self-confidence had a calming influence, while her diminutive mother Lena radiated warmth and a sense of purpose with her ever-present petitions in need of signatures. But make no mistake: Julia was a tough, eloquent, and unapologetic Marxist. She typified the unqualified nightmare then consuming the Berkeley administration and the forces of reaction consolidating in Sacramento under the mantel of Ronald Reagan.

And so the magnificent experiment underway in Berkeley’s School of Criminology was decisively dismantled and most of the core critical faculty and students associated with the journal were sent packing. The noose tightened nationally to eliminate progressive faculty and prevent graduate students radicalized in the 1960s and 1970s from gaining a professional foothold in the academy. In the short term, Julia found work as a private investigator and consultant, providing presentencing reports on offenders for defense attorneys and judges. She was a parole commissioner and director of the Women’s Resource Center for San Francisco Jails, in association with the late Richard Hongisto. In the period Julia described as exile, she taught sociology, criminology, and criminal justice at Vassar, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SUNY (New Paltz), and finally at the University of South Florida. She worked briefly at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change and was an exchange scholar with Hi at universities in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and central Asia.

Based on the latter experiences, Hi and Julia wrote a 1993 firsthand account in Humanity and Society entitled “The Crises of Soviet Legitimacy,” in which they examined the paradoxes and changing class character of Soviet society just before the collapse. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Julia and Hi regularly published articles in this journal on rape, delinquency, prison living standards, and social class and the definition of crime. Working closely with Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, Julia lined up Friendly Fascism author Bertram Gross to participate in an international discussion centered on his essay, “Some Anticrime Proposals for Progressives” (Crime and Social Justice 17, Spring-Summer 1982). Their most recent books are a history of the Berkeley School of Criminology and Big Brother, which analyzes the expansion of surveillance technology in the United States and the repression of left-wing ideas and policies.

Julia will be sorely missed by the many whose lives she touched and especially by Hi and their children, Leni and Joseph.

Julia and Hi, 1974

* Gregory Shank is the Co-Managing Editor of Social Justice and a long-term Bay Area resident.

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

Image from www.usprisonculture.com

The news has not garnered much attention on the national media, yet it is rather striking: for the first time in the last twenty years or so, crime has been rising in the United States for two consecutive years. The US Bureau of Justice has just released data from the 2012 National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), the statistical tool adopted since 1972 to make up for the “dark figure” of unreported crime that affects official statistics. The report reveals that in 2012 property and violent crimes suffered a 12 percent and 15 percent increase, respectively. Thus, what had looked like an exception in 2011—when, according to the NCVS, violent crime had increased by 17 percent and property crime by 11 percent since the previous year—might instead have marked the turning point of a long cycle of declining criminal activity and the outset of a new trend toward higher crime rates.

A note of caution is of course in order here. Despite the undeniable contribution victimization reports have provided for a more reliable understanding of crime trends in the United States, one should not overlook the many limitations affecting the very design of these surveys. It is well known, for example, that victimization surveys focus narrowly on street crimes while ignoring other, equally or more harmful types of criminal activity, namely white collar crime and state crimes—including instances of police brutality, abuses by prison guards against prisoners, or crimes taking place inside the country’s chronically overcrowded correctional institutions. Not to mention the fact that victimization surveys tend to overlook precisely the social groups that are most vulnerable to criminal victimization in the streets, as a consequence of their precarious living conditions: homeless people, various institutionalized populations, undocumented migrants, or individuals with unstable living arrangements. Finally, NCVS offers a misleading image of crime as a uniform and undifferentiated issue affecting all Americans equally (“crime is up” or “crime is down” for everyone), since it ignores the basic fact that within the segregated landscape of American cities, crime (and punishment) is highly concentrated inside areas of urban destitution marked by racial and class boundaries.

Whatever their statistical reliability, at least these data further illustrate the substantial divergence between rates of criminal activity and the penal strategies deployed by the state, with particular reference to incarceration. Indeed, another report released by the BJS a few months ago, “Prisoners in 2012,” shows that the correctional population of the United States, including federal and state prisoners, declined (although only by a modest 1.7 percent) in 2012, confirming a downward trend that has now entered its third consecutive year. A disconnect between trends in crime and changes in punishment is certainly not new. It has manifested itself with unprecedented intensity over the last twenty years in the United States, although in an opposite direction to the one we observe today: since the early 1990s, plummeting crime rates have been paralleled by a vertiginous growth of the prison population. Such contradictory tendencies should not surprise sociologists of punishment, who have long been arguing that criminalization is not just a response to crime; that the severity of punishment does not necessarily descend from the seriousness of the criminal act; and that levels of social and institutional punitiveness are shaped by economic, political, and cultural factors more than by the actual risk of victimization. Yet a persisting dilemma in criminology—as well as one of the main reasons for the very existence of the discipline, at least in its mainstream variants—is whether state punishment and related technologies of social control have any effect on crime, and here too the evidence is at best inconclusive (for a recent analysis touting controversial policing strategies like “stop and frisk” and “hot spot” policing as the single major factor behind the great crime decline in New York, see Franklin Zimring’s The City That Became Safe).

What, then, should we make of this sudden increase in crime in the United States? How can it be explained? The obvious answer, one that some commentators had started to propose as a bleak prophecy even before the crime increase was recorded, is the recessionary economic crisis that has swept the country since 2007. Indeed, according to well-established models of crime causation, it makes sense to look at the “usual suspects”—rates of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, and so on—to explain shifts in criminal activity, particularly predatory crimes. In this perspective, economic hardships would push a larger fraction of the “truly disadvantaged,” to borrow William J. Wilson’s definition, to commit crimes of survival, which in turn would result in higher incarceration rates. Therefore, penal technologies would be developed by the state simply as a reaction to shifts in criminal activity prompted by socioeconomic transformations that are essentially outside the reach of the state’s regulatory powers. In other words, in this model crime and penal policies are treated as dependent variables, while economic transformations, and, more specifically, economic crises, are treated as an independent variable. Yet we know that in the recent history of the United States such a model has simply not been at work: for most of the past three decades, crime rates have been declining both in times of economic growth and in times of recession, whereas incarceration rates have been rising at a furious pace until three years ago.

I would like to suggest here that a reversal of perspective might be in order. In the age of “mass imprisonment,” close to 1 percent of the US population is in prison or in jail (3 percent if probation and parole are included); one in three black males will go to prison in his lifetime; incarceration is more likely than marriage or college in the life of a young black male; and more blacks are in prison than were in slavery in 1850. Thus, the relationship between economy, crime, and punishment should probably be significantly revised. At the end of forty years of extraordinary concentration of the punitive powers of the state toward the mass criminalization of racialized urban poverty, we should ask whether the penal technologies unleashed by the state at the bottom of the race and class structure of US society have not become themselves constitutive elements of the structural crisis that affects the most marginalized fractions of the urban poor—rather than being simply an institutional reaction to crime as one of the undesirable consequences of such crisis.

Some scholars have recently demonstrated the paradoxical effect of concentrated incarceration on crime. In a process that mimics the economic principle of diminishing marginal returns, when it rises beyond a certain level incarceration will not only relinquish its crime-reducing effect (assuming it ever has one), but it might potentially result in an increase in criminal activity. This is due to the destructive effects of incarceration on already vulnerable individuals and families: financially (lost income, welfare bans for certain convictions, plus phone calls, packages, and trips to the jail), socially (weakening of relationships, loss of social capital, missed educational opportunities, isolation upon release), and politically (felon disenfranchisement). Through the systematic institutional sequestration of entire cohorts of population from already dilapidated urban ghettos, over the last forty years mass incarceration has eroded the social fabric of marginalized communities, displaced large fractions of their populations, depleted their material and immaterial resources, hampered the educational opportunities for a large number of youth, generated a massive diversion of public funds from social services to penal institutions, and (re)produced a large class of socioeconomic pariahs who are essentially unemployable, if not in dead-end and insecure jobs, upon their release from prison (for a powerful analysis of these processes, see Todd Clear’s Imprisoning Communities). The criminogenic effect of the power to punish—and more generally the paradox whereby repressive state intervention often tends to (re)produce the very social problems it is supposed to address—is not an exclusive prerogative of the penal field, as it has been observed in such disparate areas as immigration control, drug policy, and the so-called war on terror. However, the US penal experiment of the last four decades has been so widespread that its crisis-generating effects have extended well beyond the field of crime and punishment, to the point of destabilizing the very social structure of poor urban areas. Furthermore, as Becky Pettit has shown in her recent book Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, the massive warehousing of young disadvantaged minorities has “concealed” a large fraction of the urban poor from society—the media, public opinion, policymakers—as well as from most national surveys, thus reinforcing the ideological misrepresentation of the United States as a post-racial society set on a bright path toward declining social inequalities, narrowing racial gaps, and widespread social mobility. If prisoners were to be included in social and economic surveys, these would reveal that mass incarceration has essentially obliterated the social gains made by African Americans since the civil rights era.

The recent data indicating a timid decline in the US prison population should be welcomed as good news. It should also be noted, however, that this decline has taken place in the wake of budgetary and fiscal emergencies, rather than of any structural process of penal reform—a circumstance that renders these trends extremely precarious and reversible. Nothing short of a structural process of decarceration at the federal, state, and local levels would be needed to begin to dismantle the gargantuan penal machine the United States has built to neutralize its social contradictions; nothing short of a massive reinvestment in social welfare would begin to address the permanent crisis of the American urban poor.

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San Jose State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board.

by Gene Grabiner*

Critics have long been concerned about the potential for government abuse and overreach, as well as the desire of officials to conduct civic affairs beyond public scrutiny. As moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham cautioned, “secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.” Gore Vidal observed that “Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state, whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid.” Jurist William O. Douglas revealed that oppression, like nightfall, descends imperceptibly: “In both instances, there’s a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

Edwin Black has documented the Nazi state’s alliance with IBM and its reliance on that corporation’s data processing technology for selective repression. Given Edward Snowden’s recent revelations, we now know that the National Security Agency (NSA), a section of the Department of Defense, has been collecting metadata (phone numbers, call times and duration) on all Americans, and using its clandestine PRISM mass electronic surveillance data-mining program to record, directly from servers of Internet providers, the content of certain emails or entire email boxes. PRISM may have scooped up all Facebook content, and the New York Times reported that Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in Silicon Valley with executives at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Intel to discuss how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts. The NSA has easy access to the Cloud, which increasingly houses people’s entire hard drive backups.

Given the ongoing refusal of congressional Republicans to work across the aisle, the initial response to the NSA disclosures has been unusually bipartisan. Karl Rove argued that NSA-style spying on the people is needed to “keep the nation safe.” Congressman Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) says that “if anyone were to violate the law by releasing classified information outside the legal avenues, certainly that individual should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” According to Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California), Edward Snowden “committed an act of treason” and she is upset only insofar as he leaked the fact that we have been spied upon for years. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), as well as Senators Ben Nelson (D-Florida) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia), echoed these comments. Peter King (R-New York), chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and a former IRA supporter, called for the prosecution of Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who cover security leaks.

Nonetheless, critical voices have emerged. Tea Party Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) and John Conyers (Michigan Democratic Congressional Progressive Caucus member) introduced a House amendment to a July 2013 Pentagon spending bill that would bar the NSA from spending funds for surveillance on any citizen who was not already the subject of an investigation. The Amash-Conyers anti-NSA amendment lost by twelve votes, 205–217. Eighty-three House Democrats and 134 House Republicans voted against it.

• • •

Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations have clouded the political fault lines on the issue of violations of the Fourth Amendment. Tea Party luminary Rand Paul has staked out an anti-NSA populist-libertarian position and has sponsored the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act. In effect, it states that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any government agency to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause. This constitutional doctrine conflicts with Justice Antonin Scalia’s originalism (“what the Founding Fathers intended”), wherein the animating principle behind the Fourth Amendment is to protect personal property, and thus only prevents “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Without a valid judicial warrant, police cannot attach a GPS tracker to a person’s car and monitor his movements (United States v. Jones). However, it would be permissible to wiretap a person’s conversations by physically attaching a monitoring device to the phone company’s line on a public street, so long as a person’s home is not entered or his/her property trespassed upon.

With Big Brother watching, there is a need for a broader view of Fourth Amendment privacy protections. Metadata make it unnecessary to violate “persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” They are used to identify patterns from the external aspect of information. Instead of listening to the content of your phone calls, it captures the fact that you made a call, to whom and where, and for how long, all the while registering your physical location. In short, the external aspect has multiplied enormously, seemingly overwhelming the internal. Originalism in constitutional law fails miserably in the face of this technological innovation, since the Founders had no plausible notion of what is at issue: with an e-trail containing all the information needed to keep track of people, there is no need to listen to their conversations or enter their houses.

• • •

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase
a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
—Benjamin Franklin

Scarcity is a property of capitalist markets. Despite production in abundance, it is not an abundance of human needs fulfillment. As a result, there is a scarcity of healthy ecosystems, nutritious food, crops free of genetic tampering, meaningful employment, housing, peace, and quality public education. According to Nobel-laureate economist Paul Samuelson, “economics is a study of how people and society end up choosing with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources that could have alternate uses” [emphasis added]. Elected representatives and members of the media invoke the scarcity principle while discussing NSA snooping whenever they say that we must balance safety against liberty, usually with some liberty placed on the sacrificial altar. At the recent Netroots Nation 2013 conference, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) was booed when she said that as far as Snowden is concerned, “he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents. The fact is, we have to have a balance between security and privacy” [emphasis added].

This market analogy for scarcity, which persists within the US juridical and ideological tradition under the rubrics of “balancing of interests” and “balancing of rights,” is a prestidigitation that tacitly underlies utilitarian domain assumptions (i.e., “if you want security, you must compromise your rights”). The US Supreme Court first asserted this balancing test in Schenck v. United States (1919), in which it was determined that speech can be restricted if it represents a “clear and present danger,” such as “shouting fire in a theater.” That case expanded the power of the 1917 Espionage Act to censor free speech, with the “clear and present danger” being the publication and distribution of a pamphlet that opposed the draft and US entry into World War I. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that the exercise of free speech is contextual. Stating that conscription is tantamount to “involuntary servitude” during peacetime is protected speech, but doing so during wartime is not, and could be construed as an act of national insubordination—a substantive evil that Congress has a right to prevent.

Of course, reason dictates that no one would deliberately cause panic by falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Yet this fiction has contributed to “legal” government censorship, “legal” government trimming of the right of free speech, and the buildup of thought justifying “legal” NSA snooping, in violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments, all of which are major cornerstones of American democracy. Although by 1969 the “imminent lawless action” test achieved ascendancy, given the dominance of antiterrorism ideology, our “context” remains one of permanent war.

• • •

In a period of deepening austerity in the United States, even greater corporate dominance of politics after the Citizens United decision, and governmental paralysis in Washington (in the words of Jimmy Carter, “we do not now have a functioning democracy”), we need effective theoretical tools to analyze a mode of governance that relies upon mass surveillance and is operationalized through secret courts. This spying is a signpost of democracy lost, or at least in profound crisis. To reclaim ourselves from this situation will require an organization or movement capable of challenging intertwining state-corporate incursions.

Political society lies with the people and is invariably the source of real politics. For a new birth of freedom to prevail, we must claim democracy at a higher level. To foreclose the possibility of neofascist options, we, the people, must have a sound and progressive theory of that new birth of freedom, and perhaps a People’s Democratic Party.

* Gene Grabiner is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus (email: genegrab1@verizon.net ). He was a founding member of this journal in 1974, when it was called Crime and Social Justice. This piece is a shorter version of an article that will appear on an upcoming issue of our journal.

We are very sad to announce that yesterday (October 5, 2013) Suzie Dod Thomas, a beloved friend and founding member of the SJ Editorial Board, has passed away after a fierce battle against cancer.

Suzie has been for many years the Assistant Managing Editor for Social Justice. She was a founding member of Bay Area Women Against Rape in 1974 and worked as an organizer in the San Francisco Latin American community, first in 1977, for the Puerto Rican Organization for women, and later for quality health care in the Mission District of San Francisco. From 1976 to 1985, she was active in solidarity work with Central America and Cuba, organizing, leading, and translating for fact-finding delegations to Nicaragua and Cuba. She was also the manager and promoter for author/poet/activist Piri Thomas in his work in high schools, colleges, prisons, youth detention centers, and communities of color throughout the United States.

Suzie will be dearly missed by her family, friends, comrades, and anyone who has been inspired by her warmth, strength, and political passion. Suzie was a long-distance runner for social justice, never giving up on the struggle for a better world, and always taking principled stands against militarism, racism, sexism, and inequality. And she loved to dance and have a good time.

We remember her with the words of a poem Tony Platt wrote for her in 1988.

Leading The Way
(Suzie Dod Thomas, 1947–2013)

She has seen America from its margins.
Straddling its borders,
she could pass through
the front door
if she so chooses.
A white Puerto Rican,
A Latina gringo,
looking in,
while looking out,
holding up mirrors
for us
to
see.

She exchanged her diploma for a vision
but didn’t surrender her smarts.
A builder,
she knows construction,
how to navigate the rocks in the river,
how to steer the water
from mountain top to ocean.
She’ll swim the whole course,
leading the way,
a glint in her eye,
in her hair
an ostrich feather.

In loving memory,
the SJ Editorial Board

by Sulaimon Giwa*

This is a time of fiscal austerity, when governments are cutting back their spending and asking Canadians to assume responsibility for the shortfall. Questions are being asked about how publicly funded institutions are being held accountable for how they manage the financial resources entrusted to them for the delivery of their services. On the heels of the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim by Constable James Forcillo of the Toronto Police Service, such questions are currently being posed by Alok Mukherjee, Chair of the Toronto Police Services Board.

Eighteen-year-old Yatim was on a Toronto streetcar on July 27, 2013, reportedly brandishing a knife, when he was shot and killed. He displayed the appearance and behavior of someone who may have been mentally ill; no evidence has been adduced to support this notion. But, regardless of any mental health issues he may or may not have had, the nine gunshots fired before a police Taser was deployed amounted to excessive use of force. Nevertheless, his death has dredged up memories of police killings in which the suspects may have had mental health issues.

Mukherjee has suggested changes to Ontario’s Police Services Act that would empower chiefs of police (in concert with police services boards) to discipline, fire, and/or suspend officers without pay. At the heart of Mukherjee’s concern is whether suspended officers involved in cases of discreditable conduct causing serious personal injury or wrongful death should receive pay while being investigated for their role and involvement in these incidents. He has therefore cast doubt on whether suspending such officers with pay is the most effective use of taxpayers’ money. He has not addressed this concern directly, but his suggested legislative changes speak volumes.

Police union leaders may abhor the idea, but the fact that this issue is being openly discussed at all is significant. I would like to broaden the discussion to include substantiated cases of racial profiling by police. My interest is not to compare the death of Yatim to someone being unfairly targeted because of their skin color or race. But, as in the Yatim case, any talk of legislative reform to the provincial Act that regulates police work in Ontario must consider police misuse of their discretion. The cumulative effects of discrimination based on skin color or race can have negative physical and psychological effects—and even deadly consequences—for those targeted. Racial profiling is an abuse of police power and authority, and perpetrators, when shown to have engaged in such practice, must be made to bear the consequences of their actions. In Québec, two officers from Longueuil were accused of racial profiling and a police ethics commission ordered them to be suspended without pay; but this is not a likely outcome in Ontario, where neither the chiefs of police nor their respective police boards can recommend or fire an officer for transgressions related to racial profiling. Amendments to the Police Services Act would address this concern and accord with the demands of the very citizenry the police exist to serve and protect.

In Ottawa, the police service currently is collecting race-based data on motorists involved in traffic stops. The data are being collected as a term in a racial profiling settlement between the police services board and the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the case of Chad Aiken. At the Let’s Chat About Racial Profiling forum organized by the police services board in 2010, members of racialized communities expressed their views on the need for changes to how police officers are disciplined for acts of misconduct. Overwhelmingly, their reaction suggested little appetite for expedient public-relations efforts that are weak on meaningful disciplinary actions.

Recently, Chief Bordeleau of the Ottawa Police Service tried to make his views known on this matter, although not always clearly. In a July 2013 news report, he was candid about having the power to suspend officers without pay when they have been charged with criminal offences while off duty, a position in accordance with that of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police (OACP). But during a Q & A with the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board, when he was asked if the police services legislation needed to change to make it easier to discipline officers, his response was less than clear: “Well, it’s the case law that exists. . . . You can’t change the discipline that’s already been handed down . . .  Administrative tribunal and hearing officers are bound by decisions that are made.” However, administrative tribunals, unlike courts of law, are not bound by the principle of stare decisis, in which legal decisions are made based on principles established by decisions in earlier cases. The Chief’s lack of clarity is revealing.

Two different positions emerge from the ongoing debate. For Mukherjee, tougher disciplinary sanctions are needed in cases where an officer faces potential suspension for alleged disreputable actions committed in the line of duty. This contrasts with Chief Bordeleau’s views, and by extension the OACP’s, whose concern is to suspend officers without pay who have been charged with criminal offences while off duty. The latter position could, in effect, overlook cases where an officer engages in racial profiling in the performance of duty.

In the race to turn public outrage over Yatim’s shooting in favor of the police, care should be taken to ensure that police actions align with the expectations of the public, and that legislative and policy reform goes beyond arming all frontline police officers with Tasers. The tragic but needless murder of Yatim presents an opportunity for robust policy action that would help prevent not only officer-involved shooting in situations like Yatim’s, but also the practice of racial profiling by police.

*Sulaimon Giwa is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Work at York University. He was the coordinator for Community Policing: A Shared Responsibility (2006–2008), a project that received funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage to address racism and racial profiling in policing in Ottawa. He can be reached at sol.giwa@gmail.com.

 by James Kilgore*

There are moments when our longings for social justice cloud our vision, times when the way we want the world to be blocks our understanding of the way things really are. A good example of this is the notion of the United States’ prison system as totally driven by profit-hungry corporations that ruthlessly advance their bottom lines on the backs of the exploited. This myth contains a modicum of truth: of course, the 1 percent and beyond do make money off of locking people up. Corporations like Kitchell Construction have done very well building more than 110,000 prison “beds.” At roughly $100,000 each, that comes to about $11 billion, which is pretty serious money even for the Walton family. Despite the fields of money that have been reaped from the prison and jail boom, this economic aspect of prisons has spawned some myths that often get in the way of effectively opposing mass incarceration.

Image credit: www.darkgovernment.com

The first of these is the idea that private prison corporations are the main culprits. A wide spectrum of campaigns has focused on these corporate targets. Activists have opposed the private prisons’ attempts to colonize new territory, blocking immigration detention center proposals in Illinois, halting a bill to privatize the entire prison system of the state of New Hampshire, and driving the GEO Group “brand” off the face of the football stadium at Florida Atlantic University. These are inspiring victories and such struggles will continue. However, we also need to keep the bigger picture in mind: private prisons are not the heart of the beast. In reality, at least for the moment, they are bit players. Among them, they only control about 8 percent of prison “beds” in the system nationwide. They are more important in certain states (e.g., Texas, New Mexico) and are also a primary force in the key current growth area for incarceration: immigration detention centers, where they own and/or operate about half the immigration detention center “beds.” But if we follow the money, we will find that the total revenue for the two largest prison providers, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, came to a little over three billion dollars in 2012. That is less than half the state corrections budget for California. The real villains in the world of the incarceration game remain the state prison systems. While economics is more than incidental in the expansion of prisons, mass incarceration remains a politically driven project that has built a huge popular base of support. Politicians have played the “law and order” card, the fear of crime card, and the middle classes across the country have responded, often lending their backing to building more carceral institutions at the expense of education and other social services. Although there is a special immorality about making profit from caging people, especially given the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and Latinos, it is no less morally bankrupt to spend taxpayers’ money for prisons and jails at the expense of jettisoning the country’s social welfare system and self-identity as a caring society. Moreover, even though tales of abuse in private prisons abound, the state and federal prison systems have given us the supermaxes and Special (or Security) Housing Units (SHUs) where people live in torturous total isolation for years on end. Florence ADX, Pelican Bay SHU, and the isolation units in Angola, Louisiana, are all government-operated institutions. In fact, the privates try to stay away from the “hard cases,” preferring to focus on cherry-picking the people with nonviolent convictions and no major medical problems. Recruiting low cost “clients” helps the bottom line. So let us remember to confront the political powers that be, including some cherished icons in the Democratic Party, with at least as much venom as the private corrections companies when we carry out our campaigns.

The second convenient myth of the prison system is that it is nothing more than a string of slave labor camps where hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people work under contract to major corporations for meager wages. Late last year, researchers Stephen Fraser and Joshua Freeman released a study that claimed that “penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.”

Their perspective has resonated with a number of news services, anti-mass incarceration blogsters, and activists. For example, a recent report from Russian news service RT claimed that prisons are “becoming America’s own Chinese-style manufacturing line.” Huffington Post picked up the story, quoting Fraser and Freeman:

All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Fraser and Freeman went on to name a number of companies like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM that allegedly are making superprofits from cheap prison labor. I spent six and a half years in federal and state prison systems and this analysis has little relation to reality. Modern-day prisons are warehouses. People suffer and die in prison from the total lack of stimulus and activity. My recollections of prison yards are of hundreds of men trying to pump some meaning into their lives with maniacal exercise routines, obsessive cleaning of their living quarters, or absolute devotion to religious practice. Many also organized hustles–sports betting pools, making arts and crafts, or writing legal briefs to make a few extra bucks for a jar of coffee or a few candy bars from the commissary. Some, though a distinct minority, found a way to focus on intellectual growth. But working in a corporate sweatshop was not on our radar.

The statistics on this bear me out. Virtually all private-sector prison labor is regulated under the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). Any prison that publicly markets goods worth more than $10,000 must register with PIECP. PIECP’s first quarter report for 2012 showed 4,675 incarcerated people employed in prison or jail PIECP programs. This represents about 0.25 percent of the 2.3 million people behind bars.

Likely the largest single user of contract prison labor is Federal Prison Industries, which handles such arrangements for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Of the nearly 220,000 people in BOP facilities, just 13,369, representing approximately 8 percent of the work eligible “inmates,” were employed as of September 30, 2012. However, the overwhelming majority of this production was under contracts with government departments such as the Defense Department and Homeland Security, not private corporations.

There is an economic logic to why so few corporations use prison labor, despite the low wages and apparent rigid control over the workforce. Prisons are first and foremost about security. Production takes a back seat when there is violence on a yard, especially if it is directed at staff. A security situation may lock down a prison for days, weeks, or even months. No production deadlines are going to get in the way of security. Given that reality, along with the excessively bureaucratic nature of corrections institutions, sweatshops in the global South look like a much better bet for corporate profit margins. The claim by Vicky Pelaez in Global Research earlier this year that “thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets” is totally off the mark.

Such misconceptions about the connection between incarceration and labor do more than merely distort the facts. They also draw our attention away from the central labor issues underlying the growth of the prison population. Prison expansion is a by-product of the immiseration of urban neighborhoods, especially those that are largely African American. This deindustrialization has robbed these communities of jobs and the neoliberal restructuring of the state has stripped away the institutions of social welfare. Instead, money has poured into security and a narrowly defined “public safety”–fighting a failed War on Drugs and beefing up local police departments through federal grants that equip small-town law enforcement as if they are in the middle of a war zone. Even my own small county of Champaign in central Illinois has found the resources to purchase a drone while mental health facilities continue to close down.

The negative impact of incarceration on this displaced and discarded urban workforce continues even once they have completed their sentences. People with felony convictions cannot get Food Stamps in many states, or qualify for TANF. Many local housing authorities bar people with drug convictions, often evicting the family of those returning from prison if they house their loved ones post-release. The job market is hostile territory as well for those with a felony. Though a “Ban the Box” movement has scored victories in 12 states and over 40 counties and cities, most employment applications still contain the question about criminal background. For those of us with felony convictions, that question equates with an instant closing of the door of opportunity. Then there are all the occupations and professions with certification processes that bar or restrict people with felonies. For example, a study by the Mayor of Chicago’s office found that of 98 Illinois state statutes dealing with professional licensing, 57 contained restrictions for applicants with a criminal history. Even some people applying for licenses to become barbers or cosmetologists faced legal impediments.

People who have been involved in opposing mass incarceration often refer to the entire system as the prison-industrial complex, or PIC. Certainly, the prison sector constitutes an industry. But as the term PIC implies, the relationships between the political and economic forces at work in this process are complex. Though it is convenient to focus on corporations as the main drivers of the grandest social policy debacle of the last three decades, mass incarceration will only be reversed when we effectively contest its political agenda. That agenda is founded on the idea of criminalizing the poor and building on the fear of the rising presence of people of color in this country. As Ruthie Gilmore and Michelle Alexander have pointed out, it is part of a broader political backlash against the “welfare state” and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Black liberation struggle. We do need to stop the CCAs and the GEO Groups to fundamentally change the criminal justice system in the United States, but, more important, we need to dislodge the mindset and the political leaders who have built popular support for “lock ’em up and throw away the key.”

* James Kilgore is a research scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He writes on issues of mass incarceration with a focus on electronic monitoring and labor. He is also the author of three novels, all of which he drafted during his six and one-half years in prison, 2002-2009. He can be contacted at waazn1@gmail.com or by visiting his website (www.voiceofthemonitored.com).