by A.J. Caro*

Photo by Ala’ Badarneh. Used with permission.

“Did you hear the news?” asked my driver and teacher Mohammed, as we were leaving Ben Gurion Airport after my arrival Friday afternoon. “No,” I said, “have been flying for the last 10 hours.”

Mohammed, in his usual calm, matter-of-fact way, described how a family of four—mother, father, and two toddlers—was burned alive while sleeping in the village of Douma, outside the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The 18-month-old toddler, Ali Dawabsha, was burned to death. The other three remained in critical condition with third-degree burns until the father, Sa’ad Dawabsha, perished on August 8. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported:

According to witnesses, at roughly 4 A.M. Friday morning, two masked men arrived at two homes in the village of Douma, not far from the settlement of Migdalim. They sprayed painted graffiti reading “revenge” and “long live the Messiah” in Hebrew, breaking the windows of the homes and throwing two firebombs inside…. One of the two homes was empty at the time, but there was a family in the second: 18-month-old Ali Saad Daobasa, his father Sa’ad, mother Reham, and 4-year-old Ahmed…. According to eyewitnesses, the father was able to rescue his wife and 4-year-old son, but could not locate the baby, Ali, in the darkness.

“Can you imagine?” Mohammed continued. “Can you imagine?” I could not and still cannot; nor will I ever be able to do so.

The two terrorists suspected of breaking the windows and throwing the firebombs were seen fleeing to a nearby Jewish settlement, Ma’aleh Ephraim. Later on the same day during protests at the Atara checkpoint on the northern side of the West Bank capital city Ramallah, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot Laith Al Khaldi, a 17-year-old Birzeit University student and resident of the Jelazone refugee camp. The student died after two operations failed to save him.

The killing of Palestinian people, including by burning, is old news. Just over a year ago, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, another 17-year-old, was kidnapped and burned alive in Jerusalem. B’tselem reports that, “since August 2012, Israeli civilians set fire to nine Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Additionally, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a Palestinian taxi, severely burning the family on board. No one was charged in any of these cases. Between September 29, 2000, and 2014, 9,319 Palestinian have been killed, compared to 1,198 Israelis, as illustrated in the table below:

Sources: If Americans Knew, B’Tselem, Remember These Children.

Despite the disproportionate number of Palestinians deaths, it is they who are prevented from moving and they who are corralled like cattle in the West Bank and Gaza. If they do not have the correct papers, their families are legally separated from one another—East Jerusalemites from West Bankers, West Bankers from Gazans, and those in Jordan from those in Palestine. That is the ongoing reality of Palestinian people but, on special days, like the day of the burning of the Dawabsha family, they get special treatment: “Following the attacks, fear of rioting and disorder at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem prompted restrictions on Muslim worshippers, with only those over 50 being permitted to enter the compound.”

Who should be afraid of whom?

On the way to my destination, Mohammed and I tried to comprehend the horror and grief of the Dawabsha family. We asked how a people who had experienced the extinction of six million of their own could perpetuate similar kinds of terror, hatred, and violence.

As I drifted a bit from exhaustion after the nightlong flight, my mind wandered to the Charleston, South Carolina church killings and the burning of churches thereafter, and to all the recent victims of state violence. Just connecting the dots.

Toward the end of the ride, Mohammed asked whether I knew the word insaan. It means “to be human,” he said. If you are insaan, you only want the best for other human beings regardless of the terrible experiences you have felt in your life. That spirit permeated the lesson I learned from Mohammed on July 31, 2015.

Photo by Ala’ Badarneh. Used with permission.

We hope that both father and son can now rest in peace, if such is possible after burning to death in hellfire on earth. A week after the deadly arson, Israeli authorities from Shin Bet and the Israeli police arrested nine people as part of a crackdown on suspected Jewish terrorists, among them the grandson of slain extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane. Several of those arrested are being held in administrative detention, that is, imprisonment without trial, but to many who understand the situation on the ground and know the history, these arrests are a “false show of firm action” intended to diffuse public outrage and criticism.

  • • •

* A.J. Caro is a longtime activist in the peace and justice movement who frequently visits Palestine and Israel and other militarized areas of the world to understand the nature and impacts of armed conflicts.

A.J. Caro, “Did You Hear the News? Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter Either.” Social Justice blog, 8/12/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

by Susanne Jonas*

Image from www.anticapitalistes.net.

When legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano died on April 13, 2015 at age 74, radio and television stations in many Latin American countries interrupted their regular programming to pay tribute. Argentina’s daily newspaper Página 12 published 33 tributes on April 15.  The headline in Mexico’s La Jornada read, “The invisible [people] lose their chronicler.”

Galeano’s message was a Latin American cry for social justice. He laid bare the workings and the effects of US imperial invasions of various types and their collaborators among local elites. Argentine writer and journalist Stella Calloni tells us that he considered the fundamentalisms of IMF and World Bank technocrats to be more powerful than Islamic fundamentalisms. He shone a laser-beam exposing the crimes of the military dictatorships in nearly every Latin American nation during the 1970s.^[1] He wrote sometimes in prose, as in his early book, The Open Veins of Latin America (1971), but primarily in collections/collages of stories and vignettes.^[2]

In the words of Chilean author Ariel Dorfman, Galeano’s passion was to tell the stories that would have been unknown or forgotten, and were ignored by other writers. In a Democracy Now interview, Galeano answered a question about how he chose his stories for Children of the Days (2011): “They chose me. You know, they touched my shoulder or my back, saying ‘Tell me. I am a wonderful story and deserve to be… written by you’… After the process [of selection], the only surviving texts or stories are the ones I feel that are better than silence.”

Galeano wrote and spoke often in lyrical tones, punctuated by humor, irony, and tenderness—even about very dark subjects, and even in searing, razor-sharp analyses of injustice. He had a unique ability to inspire, to comfort, or to enrage us against the power elites—or, alternatively, to make us smile, sometimes to laugh out loud, or to shake our heads in disbelief. And he delighted the entire continent with his ode to Football (Soccer) in Sun and Shadow.

• • •

As noted in recent tributes, Galeano wrote and spoke with a Latin American voice. But at the same time, in many countries, readers and listeners felt him to be “theirs.” As one friend wrote, “When he was in Uruguay, he was Uruguayan; when he was in Cuba, he was Cuban; when he was in Guatemala, he was Guatemalan.” He was Zapatista when he was in Chiapas. In El Salvador, he was considered “one of ours.” All the more so in Argentina, where he lived in exile for several years.

Beyond nation-states, Galeano also inhabited other worlds of social justice: the worlds of indigenous and Afro-Latino peoples throughout Latin America, and the world of women’s rights. Salvadoran feminist Silvia Ethel Matus wrote about “the feminine in Galeano”; and when he died, felt that “We women have lost an ally.” He once wrote, “Human rights begin in the home.” His political hero was Rosa Luxemburg. His last book, published days after his death, is the anthology Mujeres, stories about real and mythical women, from Marilyn Monroe to Scheherazade.

• • •

Guatemala was the thread that linked me to Galeano and gave me the privilege of knowing him personally. His very early book, Guatemala: Clave de Latinoamérica (Key to Latin America; 1967), was the first I read on Guatemala, and it drew me into the country’s endlessly byzantine, convoluted dramas.^[3] That was the Guatemala of the first-wave 1960s leftist guerrilla insurgency. Guatemala was the “key” to Latin America, Galeano wrote, “not as a mirror” of all other countries, but as the first laboratory of dirty wars (counterinsurgency) and “as a source of great lessons, painfully learned.”

Even as he became the chronicler of all Latin America, Galeano remained engaged with Guatemala and referenced its painful lessons. In Days and Nights of Love and War, he wrote about the 1971 daytime assassination of a wheelchair-bound Congressman who had criticized exploitative foreign nickel company investments. Galeano served on the jury of the 1983 Permanent People’s Tribunal (Madrid), which focused on the army’s scorched-earth, genocidal response to the second-wave insurgency in the Mayan highlands. From the Maya he also learned hope: “‘What is a man on the road?’ asks a sacred Maya book. And answers, ‘Time.’ [In]…Guatemala, the tormented present remembers a different possible future.”

In July 1996, Galeano revisited Guatemala, this time as an honored speaker in a large auditorium at the national university’s historic cultural complex. His reading gave that overflow crowd a great gift, a balm for the war-torn country’s dark secrets and its ideological, class, and racial fissures. He magically lifted our spirits to another plane: “The right to dream should be part of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.”

Beyond his public readings, Galeano said he was also back to continue learning. He met with the Archbishop’s Recovery of Historical Memory commission investigating war crimes; some of those horrific war stories later appeared in Children of the Days. He also visited the Mayan highlands with Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú. And from the Mayas he took the title of Children of the Days: as he later told Democracy Now, it came “from something I heard years ago in a Mayan community of Guatemala. Somebody said, ‘We are children of the days. We are sons and daughters of time.’”

• • •

In recent years, several debates have arisen in the United States over Galeano’s legacy. The most prominent materialized when a New York Times article (5/24/2014) proclaimed in Manichaean terms Galeano’s own “disavowal” of Open Veins of Latin America, his 1971 critique of the foreign pillage and raging capitalism that created the hemisphere’s inequalities and injustices. As evidence of his disavowal, the NYT article cited Galeano’s humorous comment at a 2014 Brazilian Book Fair, “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over… my physique can’t tolerate it.” Upon his death, numerous U.S. mainstream media repeated the disavowal tale – but they missed the point: Galeano was poking fun at the writing style of his younger self. He told Democracy Now—and other interviewers, in a similar vein—“My style has changed a lot… but I’m not repentant [of Open Veins]… not a single comma, not a single period.”

Eduardo Galeano’s passing leaves a painful human and cultural void, but his spirit remains embedded in our minds and hearts. As Roberto Fernández Retamar, head of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, has said, “What is left is his extraordinary presence.” As if to affirm his presence, Galeano has left us one more forthcoming book—as yet untitled.

by David Edgar*

Ending with Thursday’s vote, the British general election campaign has been exceptional in many ways. Its result will almost certainly be indecisive and it’s possible that the shape of the new government will remain unknown for days or even weeks. But underneath the battle between two middle-aged white males for the office of prime minister, new forces are engaged. The most emblematic visual moment of the campaign was a group hug by three women party leaders after a television debate. But the outcome will be decided by two groups of angry, white, poor men.

The roots of this exceptional election lie in the last one. After 13 years in power, with an unpopular leader (Gordon Brown) and having been through the financial crisis of 2008, the Labour Party expected to lose the 2010 election. In Britain, the party that gains an overall majority in the House of Commons forms a government, with the majority party leader as prime minister and the cabinet drawn from that party’s members of parliament (and a few from the House of Lords).

Two strong parties in a winner-takes-all electoral system meant that one party or the other was able to govern alone for almost all the postwar years. However, the proportion of seats won by other parties had been gradually increasing since the 1980s. In the 2010 election David Cameron’s Conservatives won the largest number of seats, but not an absolute majority, so they had to negotiate an agreement with the third party, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, to govern in coalition. Both parties accused Labour of running up a massive fiscal deficit in its last years in office, and were committed to a policy of fiscal austerity to bring that deficit down. However, under its new leader Ed Miliband, Labour could argue that—like Barack Obama’s—its 2009 and 2010 spending stopped the post-crash recession turning into a slump. Meanwhile, outraged by their usually left-leaning, protest-vote party going into coalition with the Conservatives, around a third of the Liberal Democrats told pollsters that they would vote Labour next time.

Commentators thought that this spelled a return to traditional two-party politics: a right-wing government (albeit formed of two parties) cutting spending and causing unemployment, up against a left-wing opposition calling for greater spending, particularly for the poor.  However, the deep disillusionment with all politicians—the British parliament had been rocked by an expenses scandal in the dying years of the Labour government—merely shifted the protest vote elsewhere. And, as across Europe, that protest vote was concerned not just with economic but also social issues, particularly those of identity.

In 2010 the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing populist party that argues for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, gained a paltry 3.1% of the votes. However, under its effective leader Nigel Farage, UKIP persuaded right-wing voters that the only way to reduce immigration was to withdraw from the EU, which allows free movement of labour across the continent.

Over the last five years, UKIP has seen its polling increase to well into the 20s, and, in 2014, it won both the local and European elections (on low turn-outs). UKIP was seen as taking votes from the Conservatives, which indeed it did, provoking Cameron’s party to chase it to the right on immigration (slashing benefits to migrants and their families) and Europe (promising a referendum on Britain’s continuing membership). Under the winner-takes-all system, UKIP was unlikely to take a huge number of seats at the general election, but by splitting the right-wing vote it could let Labour win in many marginals. The rise of a successful right-wing populist party was of course alarming to the left, but—secretly—Labour strategists viewed it as an asset.

However, Labour (and almost everyone else) had misunderstood the new force. UKIP was presumed to consist of red-faced military types and stern blue-rinsed matrons. However, research showed that its voters were actually poorer, older, and whiter (and more male) than the general population. Despite leader Nigel Farage’s instinctive right libertarianism, the party shifted to the left on some economic issues (in the manner of the French National Front). Suddenly, they were a threat to Labour as well, and so the party joined the anti-immigration arms-race, ratcheting up its own rhetoric.

Nonetheless, Labour seemed set fair at least to be the largest party at the election. Two years ago, the economy started turning around, with unemployment falling. Still claiming that austerity policies had delayed the recovery, Labour shifted its ground from the recession to the cost of living. It pointed to a drop in living standards—working people are earning on average £1,600 less a year (after inflation), compared with 2010. The jobs that have been created include many that are low-paid, part-time, and on zero-hours contracts. Nearly a million people use voluntary food banks. Echoing Ronald Reagan, Labour was able to ask the electorate if it felt better off than four years ago, and get the same answer. In this, Labour was positing an alternative narrative to the Conservatives’: a narrative in which, for years if not decades, the super-rich had got super-richer, working- and middle-class wages had flatlined, and the people’s aspirations had been met either by tax credits topping up their wages, or by personal debt.

However, with the country still borrowing over £75b a year, Labour didn’t feel that it could offer an end to austerity, only a fairer distribution of pain. With this offer, and with UKIP still likely to bite more substantially into the Conservatives’ vote than theirs, Labour felt confident of winning around 35% of the vote, on the basis of which it could be the largest party, and maybe even win an absolute majority. There was after all nowhere else for its core vote to go.

That all changed in the most unexpected way on September 18 last year. Almost unnoticed, traditionally Labour Scotland had been shifting to the Scottish National Party (SNP), whose main plank is independence, for many years. Following devolution of many powers to a Scottish assembly in 1999, the SNP served two terms as an opposition to a Labour-led government, then as a minority government from 2007, and finally as a majority in 2011. As such, the SNP insisted that a referendum on Scottish independence be held last fall, which ended up with a substantial, but not victorious, vote for the Scots to leave the union (45% to 55%). However, the energy of the Yes to independence campaign led to a massive increase in SNP membership and—now—the serious prospect that the SNP will win all of Scotland’s 59 seats, including the 41 Labour won in 2010. This haemorrhage would and will stop Labour gaining an absolute majority: at the moment, according to the polls, it looks like stopping them being the largest party, and thus having the first chance to form a government.

In the heady afterglow of the referendum campaign, there is another reason for the SNP’s prospective success. After the vote, the SNP’s leader Alex Salmond handed on power to his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, who has shifted the party significantly to the left. Now, in Scotland at least, there is a party vowing to end austerity and to increase public spending. At the end of the second televised debate (boycotted by Prime Minister Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg) Labour’s Ed Miliband looked on as three anti-austerity party leaders—the SNP’s Sturgeon, the Welsh Nationalists’ Leanne Wood and the Green Party’s Natalie Bennett—engaged in a group hug. Suddenly, the politics of gender, national identity, and the environment melded with traditional left politics of public spending and defending the poor.

This kind of rainbow alliance has been posited before. There are proper doubts about how left the SNP has actually been in power in Edinburgh. But this time there are over 60 constituencies likely to vote for a left agenda (on top of many constituencies with Labour MPs who oppose austerity). And, what was the bedrock of support for the Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum? The traditionally Labour-supporting working-class of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. In fact, angry, poor, white Scottish men. The only demographic difference with the UKIP vote is that the Glasgow Yes vote was younger.

The lesson of this election may turn out to be that when there is an oppositional, left-wing alternative to the prevailing austerity consensus, then a surprising number of people vote for it. But it’s also true that—in the absence of such a repository—the angry and disconnected can go another way. And the result of Thursday’s vote? It looks like there will be an anti-Conservative majority, but it may well be that the Conservatives win the largest number of seats, and seek to cling on to power. In which case, there may well be another election soon.

* David Edgar is a playwright who has written for Britain’s National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and many other theatres. His RSC adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby won major awards in London and New York, and is frequently revived. His two plays about a fictional West Coast gubernatorial election—Continental Divide—were presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Berkeley Rep in 2003. He was Professor of Playwriting at the University of Birmingham and is currently Humanitas Visiting Professor of Drama at Oxford. He is a frequent commentator and reviewer for The Guardian and the London Review of Books.

• • •

David Edgar, “Not Over Yet: The British General Election of 2015.” Social Justice blog, 5/5/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

by Salvatore (Turi) Palidda*

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa, Italy, in August 2007. Photo by Sara Prestianni. From Noborder Network on Flickr.

The drowning of 700 (and maybe as many as 900) migrants in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea on April 17, 2015, should be seen as a direct consequence of two major facts: the multiplication of wars and the prohibition of migrations. The mainstream media is once again crying crocodile tears and displaying hypocrisy, dishonesty, and even complacency: to them, this tragedy is just another massive distraction to conceal the real causes of these massacres and provide cover for those who are responsible for them.

Especially since 1990, most global migrants have been fleeing wars, or the direct and indirect consequences of these conflicts. This is true for Palestinians, Rwandans, Sudanese, Eritreans, Congolese, Kurds, and Syrians, as well as people from the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, and other war zones that the media rarely mention. The proliferation of wars since 1945 is primarily due to the ongoing increase in the production and legal and illegal trade in weapons by the major world powers and their allies. It is well known, for example, that the weapons and the money amassed by isis come mainly from the Emirates allied with the United States, Russia, or China. For years now, the largest annual weapons fair (the Special Operation Forces Exhibition and Conference, SOFEX) has taken place in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). About 600 representatives of major industries attended the latest one, held on February 22–26, 2015, at Abu Dhabi; participants included ministers, diplomats, police chiefs, and corporate CEOs from the represented countries (see link; see also video of the previous SOFEX).

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported a significant increase in the production and export of arms, particularly since 2005 (source); the leading exporting countries are the United States, Russia, Germany, China, France, and Italy (which often operates in joint ventures with US companies or as a subcontractor). The top five countries together comprise 74 percent of the volume of world exports; the United States and Russia alone control 56 percent of the market. The main importing countries are India, Saudi Arabia, China, the UAE, and Pakistan.

Especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, financial, military, and police lobbies, both national and transnational, have systematically exacerbated international crisis scenarios and constructed suitable enemies to justify permanent or infinite war (as G.W. Bush, Jr., blatantly called it). After Al Qaeda, Isis has emerged as an even more terrifying enemy, one apparently uncontrollable by the great world powers and their Arab allies. The situation in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere has spun out of control, too. A strategy of endless war—what Jonathan Simon refers to as “governing through terror”—benefits from these developments. Ending this situation does not serve the interests of countries producing and exporting weapons; many may decry such wars, even the pope. Left unsaid is that responsibility lies upstream and resides with those profiting from war and maintaining or increasing their dominance thanks to it (e.g., banks, including the Vatican’s).

Escaping the war, even at the cost of risking one’s life, is the only possibility left to those who have the strength, ability, and money to flee. Many unscrupulous individuals seek to take advantage of this need. Those involved in the smuggling of migrants can conduct this criminal business solely because a prohibitionist regime of migration control exists. If help were available to those seeking to escape with their lives, using, for example, humanitarian corridors and regular access to countries not at war, traffickers could not profit from their desperation. The “naval blockade” off Libya’s coast proposed by some Italian lawmakers, beyond being senseless from a legal and technical standpoint, is worthy of twenty-first-century neo-Nazis.

The United Nations should compel the United States, the European Union, and Russia, as well as China, Japan, and other countries that are directly or indirectly responsible for today’s wars and desperate migrations, to assist migrants and provide regular access to their territories. That was the case with people fleeing from Southeast Asia in the 1970s as a result of the war in Vietnam and Laos, and the massacres of Pol Pot in Cambodia. However, the protectionist and prohibitionist logic that prevails in the European Union prevents the European countries from taking such an initiative—instead feeding racism and signifying the economic decline and political irrelevancy of the region.

Conversely, the United States has cynically relied upon regular and irregular migration to fuel its economic success from 1970 to 2007, and even during its recovery from the latest crisis. Since 1990, the US population has increased by almost 70 million. At the same time, the United States has received more than 13 million undocumented immigrants; every year 400,000 to one million of them have been expelled; and an estimated 18,500 were killed in 1998–2013 by border police, vigilantes, and criminals enjoying the manhunt. Thanks to regular and irregular immigration, the United States has become the first economic, military, and political power in the world; racist theories à la Huntington fit perfectly in this game between inclusion and rejection, so that immigrants are forced to earn their new life through humiliation, sacrifice, and hard labor, all to the benefit of the receiving country.

In contrast, Europe’s rigid prohibitionist immigration regime turns all migrants into illegal aliens to be used as neo-slaves in the shadow economy. It results in a higher death toll among migrants trying to reach the EU, fewer naturalizations, fewer regularizations, and more precarious living conditions. Across EU-27 (the 27 countries comprising the European Union, with 505 million legal residents), there were fewer total immigrants in 2012 than was the case in the United States—21 million according to Eurostat—and since 1990 there have been fewer naturalizations. Another 33 million European residents were born in a country outside the EU-27. It is estimated that five million illegal immigrants reside in Europe.

Besides the major differences between Europe and the United States in terms of social policies (starting with welfare), the United States controls immigration through a mix of softer practices and violent and racist forms of selection. Europe appears as an aborted political entity, a boorish continent ready to enslave a few passersby and erect new fortifications. This approach to a globalized world is suicidal, especially when wealthy emerging countries are scrambling to acquire the assets of a bankrupt and decadent continent.

* Salvatore Palidda, born in Sicily to a US citizen (his father emigrated to the United States in 1922), has lived and worked in Milan, Germany, and in Paris, where he has earned his PhD and started his academic career at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Today he is a professor in the Department of Education, University of Genoa, Italy. His research focuses on the military, the police, and national and international migrations. Among his publications are Governance of Security and Ignored Insecurities in Contemporary Europe (Ashgate 2015, forthcoming); Racial Criminalization of Migrants in the 21st Century (Ashgate 2011); and Conflict, Security and the Reshaping of Society: The Civilisation of War (Routledge 2010, with Alessandro Dal Lago).

• • •

Salvatore Palidda, “Deaths in the Mediterranean: Wars, Weapons, and Migrations.” Social Justice blog, 4/27/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

by Peter Baird*

Editor’s note: As a complement to the following blog, see the in-depth analysis of neoliberal economic change and authoritarianism in Mexico by Job Hernández Rodríguez in “Latin America Revisited,” Vol. 40-4 of Social Justice.

Mexico City police face a teacher from Michoacan. Teachers arrived in the capital from all over the country to demonstrate against the government’s education reforms. © 2015 by David Bacon.

During September 1–5, 2014, I attended and presented at a forum of the Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) in Mexico City that documented the impact of the past 20 years of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Many Mexican economists and researchers at the Tribunal provided testimony to document the increase in poverty (now affecting 50 to 60 percent of the population), decrease in real wages (40 percent loss since the mid-1990s), increasing dependence upon multinational banks and corporations, and increased human rights violations since NAFTA’s implementation.

I was invited to participate by one of the organizers, Dr. Alejandro Álvarez Bejar, a longtime friend, political activist, Social Justice advisory board member, and part of the faculty at National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) School of Economy. My presentation was about the work that Sacramento State University colleague Nadeen Ruiz and I have been doing in Oaxaca and California in recent years regarding transnational teacher education. But mostly I listened and took notes from the rich oral and visual presentations from some 30 other presenters.

The purpose of the forum and the sister conference is to prepare a case that will be presented before the PPT in Rome (see the PPT’s website).  The PPT’s verdicts are not binding, but they can serve as recommendations to the International Criminal Court. According to the lead organizer for the PPT in Mexico, Andrés Barreda, this process is seen by leaders of the faith, labor, and human rights communities as one way that grassroots voices can challenge NAFTA and the consensus among opinion makers that free trade is good for the Americas. What follows are some highlights from the testimonies and research on how NAFTA and similar neoliberal policies are responsible for institutionalized poverty and violence in Mexico.

John Saxe Fernández, a senior economist and political scientist from the UNAM’s Institute of Economic Studies, focused on the privatization of education, the destruction of unions, and the very recent reforms by the Peña Nieto government that have denationalized the oil industry and handed sectors of it over to Shell, Chevron, and other private oil conglomerates. Saxe Fernández called our attention to the way in which NAFTA ties Mexico not only to the US economy but, worse still, also to its military and national security priorities worldwide.

Jeff Faux, a researcher from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, and one of several North Americans at the PPT, explained that NAFTA is clearly aimed at increasing the power, profits, and hegemony of ruling circles in all three countries involved (the United States, Canada, and Mexico), with the United States in the driver’s seat:  “It was never about increasing general prosperity,” he said, “but to increase profits by increasing inequality and to keep the Left from taking power in Mexico.” International agreements are more powerful and more difficult to change than domestic ones are, and it will be difficult for any future progressive government to renegotiate the terms of NAFTA. For that reason, broad alliances of popular movements and groups of all kinds—labor, academic, health, scientific, environmental, etc.—may be the only option available to seek a different future.

Journalist and photographer David Bacon (see his image in this blog, and his personal website) gave an excellent summary of current US immigration policies, which are rooted in the exploitation of Mexican labor. Additional testimony is now being gathered by the Tribunal among Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States. (A reference to one of Bacon’s many excellent online articles is provided in the footnotes below.)

Tony Clark, a longtime activist from the University of Toronto, was one of several Canadians who documented the dramatic changes for the worse in Canada since NAFTA was signed:  “Historically,” he said, “Canada has been a resource supplier to the industrial powers (England, France, and now the United States), providing raw materials like fish, wheat, water, lumber, and now oil and minerals.  NAFTA promised us Canadians more industrialization so we could grow and become more independent, but this was a big lie. Now we are even more stuck in the model of extractivism. Article 315 [of NAFTA’s Chapter 3 regarding “National Treatment and Market Access for Goods”], for example, requires Canada to export its raw materials. So Canada is a petro-economy and a petro-state, at the expense of the industrial and service sectors. It has become a resource and energy colony. Much of this is also true of the United States—especially with fracking and agro-exports.”  Clark praised the PPT as an example of grassroots organizing and consciousness-raising that needs to expand its reach in Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Mexican author (Revista Regeneración), filmmaker, and activist Jesús Ramírez Cuevas offered a particularly dramatic presentation and provided many examples of how “NAFTA equals violence, loss of liberty, and violation of human rights. Narco-violence disrupts and disorganizes civil society in Mexico, creating conditions for greater control and stealing of land and natural resources. So far there have been 100,000 deaths and 25,000 disappeared—plus the poverty of a whole generation of children and youth. This is ‘free trade,’ here are the cadavers. The puppet masters and arms are US, but the dead are Mexican.”

The  September 26, 2014, disappearance and likely killings of 43 student protesters from a teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, will undoubtedly form part of the case being brought by the People’s Permanent Tribunal. As Ramírez Cuevas reminded us, such internationally backed violence—carried out by a range of perpetrators, including US government-financed and -trained Mexican police and military, private security forces of transnational companies, DEA agents, and international drug cartels—is so strong because people in communities and cities throughout Mexico are resisting the imposition of NAFTA-related neoliberalism. In total, there are 350 current conflicts involving communities that are fighting back against outsiders trying to exploit their land and resources. Stay tuned to the PPT-Mexico’s website (www.tppmexico.org ) and note the following resources.

Resources

• The Spring 2014 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas, “Mexico: The State against the Working Class,” provides excellent articles written by folks like Alejandro Alvarez, David Bacon, and many others (info@nacla.org).
• For more on the teachers movement and the work of the Trinational Coalition in Defense of Public Education, see www.trinationalusa.org.
• Another pertinent study on NAFTA is the AFL-CIO’s report, “NAFTA at 20,” at http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Trade/NAFTA/NAFTA-at-20
• David Bacon, “Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico,” at http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/10/11/globalization-and-nafta-caused-migration-from-mexico/
• Job Hernández Rodríguez, “Mexico: Economic Change without Democracy,” Social Justice, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2104).

* Peter J. Baird, Emeritus Professor in the College of Education at Sacramento State University, is a long-term observer of Mexican politics and culture. He is coauthor of Beyond the Border: Mexico and the U.S. Today and director of an annual study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Blog by Tony Platt*

An incident at 133rd St and 7th Ave during the Harlem riot of 1964. From Wikipedia.

“There have been commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations, and nothing happens,” said President Obama when he announced in December the creation of a blue-ribbon Task Force on 21st Century Policing to come up with solutions to the “simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.” This time, he promised, it “will be different,” not just “an endless report collecting dust on the shelf.”

The Task Force is expected to complete its work in March. I’ll be looking for two indicators of whether or not it has something new to contribute: recognition that police antagonism to impoverished communities of color, especially African-American communities, is longstanding and institutionalized; and grappling with why a century of investigations has produced endless reports and no significant changes. I speak from personal experience as the associate director of a 1969 task force in the United States whose recommendations to a national commission about how to understand and stop police violence are caked in dust.

Racial violence is in the life-blood of the United States, and the police are usually its enforcers. As James Baldwin observed in 1960, “the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.” Official investigations into white violence against Black communities during the 1910s disclosed that the police typically “shared the lust of the mob for Negro blood,” as a congressional committee noted in its report on the bloody East St Louis pogrom of 1917. Following a day of protests and property destruction in Harlem in 1935, a commission appointed by the mayor found that the police had a reputation for being “persecutors and oppressors” in the community, and were responsible for “aggressions and brutalities upon the Harlem citizens not only because they are Negroes but because they are poor and therefore defenseless.”

In An American Dilemma, a comprehensive investigation of American race relations during the 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal described the “average Southern policeman” as “a promoted poor white with a legal sanction to use a weapon” against “Negroes whom he conceives of as dangerous or as ‘getting out of their place.’” A few years later, the Civil Rights Congress petitioned the United Nations for relief against “acts of genocide against the Negro people,” asserting that “once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it’s the policeman’s bullet.”

And it wasn’t only a problem of the South, as Gunnar Myrdal suggested. In his ethnographic study of Chicago police in the late 1940s, William Westley noted that it was routine “to mock the Negro and use some type of stereotyped categorization.” Richard Wright was more blunt in his assessment: “When they see six of us, they become downright apprehensive and alarmed. And because they are afraid of us, we are afraid of them. Life for us is daily warfare and we live hard, like soldiers.” In one of the first sociological textbooks that focused on African American culture and institutions, published in 1949, E. Franklin Frazier observed matter-of-factly: “The police, who generally use brute force on Negroes, have little respect for the rights of Negroes as citizens or human beings.”

Urban protests and riots in the 1960s generated an unprecedented flurry of investigations and reports, all of which paid attention to the role of the police in enforcing inequality. The police “come into the neighborhood aggravated and mad,” a 33-year-old resident told researchers for Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited in 1964; “they start more violence than any other people start.” James Baldwin hardly knew anybody in Harlem, “from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.”

“In city slums and ghettos,” reported President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, “there is much distrust of the police”—which is not surprising given that “the use of racial epithets, such as ‘nigger,’ ‘coon,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘Pancho’ appears to be widespread.” Racist insults were so common in Oakland, California, in the mid-1960s that the police chief had to issue a written directive banning the use of these terms, plus “coon, spook, head hunter, jungle bunny, burr head, ape, spick, and mau mau.”

There is a “widespread belief among Negroes,” concluded the 1968 Kerner Commission, “in the existence of police brutality and in a double standard of justice.” The “deep hostility between police and ghetto communities” was confirmed in sociological studies sponsored by the Commission. Surveys in 15 cities found that the majority of African Americans stopped and frisked on the street “are innocent of any wrong doing”; one in three African Americans said the police “rough up people unnecessarily”; and the majority of police believed that African Americans were moving “too fast” in their demand for equality and were opposed to “Negroes socializing with whites.”

The study that I coauthored in 1969 for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence similarly reported that “the majority of rank and file policemen are hostile toward Black people.” Bold political solutions were required. “If communities are to be policed adequately,” we argued, “the principle of community control of the police seems inescapable”—but not to the commissioners, who called instead for doubling down on “our investment in the administration of justice.”

Despite endless recommendations by national and local commissions to reform police abuse through recruitment of Black officers, training in multicultural sensitivity, technological innovations, and creation of citizens’ advisory committees, nothing much has changed. In the words of James Baldwin, it’s the “same old piano, playing the same blues.”

Twenty years after the Kerner report, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, a leading social work professor, lamented that “several Black males are killed each week in America in lethal encounters with police officers.” In December 2014, 46 years after the Kerner report, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we still need to confront what Eric Adams, cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, calls “a legacy of inequity,” exemplified “in the nightstick and quick-trigger-finger justice” that has been “carved into the culture of law enforcement over decades.”

Hopefully, Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing will ponder the troubling history of racial violence and not simply recycle a century of cosmetic panaceas. It needs to keep in mind that the modern police system was designed to keep the marginalized in their place and to warn the poor of a fate worse than poverty. The fundamental problem with US policing is neither personal nor professional deficiencies, but rather how they are structured and organized.

A good place for the 2015 Task Force to begin might be dusting off the 1969 Task Force on which I worked, and paying close attention to its conclusion: “This nation cannot have it both ways: either it will carry through a firm commitment to massive and widespread political and social reform, or it will develop into a society of garrison cities where order is enforced without due process of law and without the consent of the governed.”

• • •

References
Adams, Eric L. 2014. “We Must Stop Police Abuse of Black Men.” New York Times, December 5.
Baldwin, James. 1961 “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem.” In Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press. Originally published in Esquire, July 1960.
Baldwin, James. 1967. Preface to The Negro in New York, edited by Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby. New York: The New York Public Library.
Civil Rights Congress. 1951. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations. New York: Civil Rights Congress.
Frazier, E. Franklin. 1949. The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan.
Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. 1964.  Youth in the Ghetto. New York: HARYOU.
Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem. 1935. The Negro in Harlem. Reprinted in The Politics of Riot Commissions, edited by Tony Platt. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. 1968. Report; and Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. 1969.  To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. 1967. The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society; and The Police. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Report of the Special Committee Authorized by Congress to Investigate the St. Louis Riots. July 1918. Reprinted in The Politics of Riot Commissions, edited by Tony Platt. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Skolnick, Jerome. 1968. “The Police and The Urban Ghetto.” Research Contributions of the American Bar Foundation 3.
Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation. 1969. The Politics of Protest. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office.
Taylor Gibbs, Jewelle. 1988. “The New Morbidity: Homicide, Suicide, Accidents, and Life-Threatening Behaviors.” In Gibbs et al., Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species. New York: Auburn House.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Viking Press.

* Tony Platt is a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. In 1969, he was Associate Director of the Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore*

After declining for three consecutive years, the US prison and jail population increased in 2013. The widely declared victory over mass incarceration was premature at best. Below I raise four areas of particular concern about the state of the anti-prison movement.

(1) A tendency to cozy up to the right wing, as though a superficial overlap in viewpoint meant a unified structural analysis for action.

Nearly 40 years ago, Tony Platt and Paul Takagi (1977) identified as “new realists” the law-and-order intellectuals who purveyed across all media and disciplines the necessity of being hard on the (especially Black) working class. Today’s new “new realists”—the correct name for the “emerging bipartisan consensus”—exude the same stench. However differently calibrated, the mainstream merger depends on shoddy analysis and historical amnesia—most notably the fact that bipartisan consensus built the prison-industrial complex (PIC). The PIC isn’t just the barred building, but the many ways in which un-freedom is enforced and continues to proliferate throughout urban and rural communities: injunction zones and intensive policing, felony jackets and outstanding warrants, as well as school expulsions and job exclusions. Racial justice and economic democracy demand different paths from the one the new “new realists” blazed. Their top-down technocratic tinkering with the system renovates and aggrandizes it for the next generation.

The left-liberal side of the bipartisan consensus co-opts vocabulary and rhetorical flourishes developed for different purposes by organizations engaged in bottom-up, antiracist struggle. Slogans such as “education, not incarceration” willfully obscure the vital distinctions between the new “new realists” and the grassroots organizations whose work they distort. Unfortunately, many who point out the cynical appropriation of tactical principles or highlight underlying strategic differences find themselves accused of obstructionism or worse.

Even before the eponymous book appeared, grassroots organizations knew that “the revolution will not be funded” (Incite 2007). That said, organizations rightly decided to take available money and run in order to popularize constructively radical remedies for fundamental social problems. Not surprisingly, the very few sources that once funded innovative work have abandoned it and they now wrap system-reinforcing work in phrases lifted from the thought and creativity of left and abolition grassroots struggle. Indeed, foundations cut loose the very organizations that came together in the 1998 Critical Resistance conference and consolidated the contemporary anti-prison movement. As a consequence, understanding and energy have taken a detour into reform for a few, while there is no change for the many.

Why the withdrawal of resources? From the perspective of the deep-pocket new “new realists,” the organizations that built the movement over the past two decades are profoundly unrealistic: their politics are too radical, their grassroots constituents too unprofessional or too uneducated or too young or too formerly incarcerated, and their goals are too opposed to the status quo.

What is the status quo? Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. Thus, criminalization and mass incarceration are class war, as Platt and Takagi explained in 1977. Therefore, the struggle against group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death is waged in every milieu—environmental degradation, public-goods withdrawal, attacks on wages and unions, divide-and-conquer tactics among precarious workers, war, etc. Police killings are the most dramatic events in a contemporary landscape thick with preventable, premature deaths.

Although it has become mildly mainstream to decry outrages against poor people of color, the new “new realists” achieve their dominance by defining the problem as narrowly as possible in order to produce solutions that on closer examination will change little.

(2) A tendency to aim substantial rhetorical and organizational resources at the tiny role of private prison firms in the prison-industrial complex, while minimizing the fact that 92 percent of the vast money-sloshing public system is central to how capitalism’s racial inequality works.

The long-standing campaign against private prisons is based on the fictitious claim that revenues raked in from outsourced contracts explain the origin and growth of mass incarceration. In any encounter about mass incarceration, live or on the Internet, print or video, sooner rather than later somebody will insist that to end racism in criminal justice the first step is to challenge the use of private prisons.

Let us look at the numbers. Private prisons hold about 8 percent of the prison population and a barely measurable number (5 percent) of those in jails. Overall, about 5 percent of the people locked up are doing time in private prisons. What kind of future will prison divestment campaigns produce if they pay no attention to the money that flows through and is extracted from the public prisons and jails, where 95 percent of inmates are held? Jurisdiction by jurisdiction, we can see that contracts come and go, without a corresponding change in the number or the demographic identity of people in custody. In addition, many contracts are not even held by private firms, but by rather municipalities to whom custody has been delegated by state corrections departments.

(3) A tendency to pretend that systematic criminalization will rust and crumble if some of those caught in its iron grip are extricated under the aegis of relative innocence.

One of the most troubling moves by the new “new realists” is to insist on foregrounding the relatively innocent: the third-striker in for stealing pizza or people in prison on drug possession convictions. The danger of this approach should be clear: by campaigning for the relatively innocent, advocates reinforce the assumption that others are relatively or absolutely guilty and do not deserve political or policy intervention. For example, most campaigns to decrease sentences for nonviolent convictions simultaneously decrease pressure to revise—indeed often explicitly promise never to change—sentences for serious, violent, or sexual felonies. Such advocacy adds to the legitimation of mass incarceration and ignores how police and district attorneys produce serious or violent felony charges, indictments, and convictions. It helps to obscure the fact that categories such as “serious” or “violent” felonies are not natural or self-evident, and more important, that their use is part of a racial apparatus for determining “dangerousness.”

For example, campaigners for California’s Proposition 47 placed a widely touted “bipartisan” op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, coauthored by Newt Gingrich and B. Wayne Hughes Jr., in which the authors argued that “California has been overusing incarceration. Prisons are for people we are afraid of, but we have been filling them with many folks we are just mad at.”

Note the use of the word “afraid.” The new “new realists,” with their top-down reforms, are trying to determine who constitutes “we”; worse, they also reinforce a criminal justice system, ideology, and image bank that justified Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony—just as it justified Bernard Goetz’s actions three decades ago. #BlackLivesMatter is an absolute statement, watered down to #sometimes by the opportunistic relativism of the new “new realists.”

(4) A tendency to virulently oppose critique from the Left, as though the work of thinking hard about how and what we do interferes with the work of reform.

Opportunists beguile audiences and divert attention and resources from people and organizations that have been fighting for decades to change the foundations on which mass incarceration has been built: structural racism, structural poverty, and capitalism devouring the planet. And they succeed in part because it has become unhip to subject the decisions, rhetoric, and goals of reform campaigns to any kind of thoughtful scrutiny. At stake is not only how we fight to win, but also how prepared we are for victories. Prepare to win means be ready for the morning after. If, for example, Proposition 47 actually releases savings that can be spent by school districts, who can ensure that the money goes to real educational programs, and not to school cops, school discipline, and school exclusion programs?

Fight to win.

References
Platt, Tony and Paul Takagi. 1977. “Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New ‘Realists.’” Crime and Social Justice 8: 1–16. Reprinted in Social Justice 40(1–2): 192–215.
Incite, eds. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

* Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a cofounder of many social justice organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of a local community health clinic that provides free basic health care and other basic services to marginalized populations in the area, I have been conducting participant observation among several returning prisoners, mostly African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 50. In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots of some of these men (and often their partners) as they struggle for survival after prison in a postindustrial ghetto. For more detailed information on this project, please read here. Other episodes in this series:
#1 – Get a Job, Any Job 
#2 – The Working Poor
#4 – In the Shadow of the Jailhouse

• • •

Alessandro and Rico make the move to Rico’s new apartment.

From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime
and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.
—President Bill Clinton, State of the Union, January 23, 1996

Finding suitable housing upon release from prison is one of the first priorities and one of the most difficult challenges for ex-offenders. The recent sociological literature has rarely analyzed the nexus between homelessness and incarceration (but see Gowan 2010), despite several surveys showing that a high percentage of homeless people have spent time in prison, and that a significant number of released prisoners face the prospect of homelessness upon release (Roman and Travis 2004, 7). The effects of draconian measures introduced at the height of the war on drugs, such as the “One Strike and You’re Out” rules that deny convicted drug offenders access to subsidized housing, are compounded today by the chronic lack of affordable housing in the urban areas to which most ex-offenders return (Thompson 2008, 68–87). In California, and particularly in large cities such as San Francisco and Oakland, the situation is compounded by two recent developments: the ongoing process of gentrification of residential areas, which is reducing the stock of accessible housing (see Beitel 2013; Smith 1996), and the provisions of Public Safety Realignment, which deprives growing numbers of ex-offenders of the few temporary housing options (e.g., halfway houses, transitional housing, etc.) available to state parolees. Under these circumstances, returning prisoners are increasingly left to fend for themselves in a hostile and often discriminatory housing market. The few who are fortunate enough to have stable families find adequate housing upon release; many, however, face the prospect of becoming homeless or falling prey to slumlords who populate the shadow economy of the streets.

• • •

Rico is a soft-spoken 50-year-old man who was released from state prison in 2010. Born in Puerto Rico, he was raised by his single mother in the infamous Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. During his childhood, which he spent as a hustler in the streets of New York, he was sexually abused by an uncle and suffered constant beatings by his mother’s violent boyfriend. As a young teenager, he started using drugs and dropped out of high school; as soon as he turned 18, he moved to Oakland to be with his biological father, who was dealing drugs. Rico sold drugs for his father, but soon the two were arrested. In jail, his father assured him that they would both be out in no time if Rico, who at the time did not have any convictions, would “take the rap” for the two of them. Young and inexperienced, Rico obeyed, and his father was released after a few days. Rico, however, was sentenced to five years in state prison; during that time, he says that he never received a visit, a call, or even a letter from his father. Rico became addicted to heroin at the age 18 and has been in and out of prison, mostly for drug-related charges, for the past 30 years.

When I first met him, on a warm morning in late September 2012, he had been clean for over a year; he had just graduated from a drug rehabilitation program and was staying in a sober-living house. At the time, he was earning $800 a month at the community clinic in West Oakland that served as the base for my research. This job allowed him to save money each month—something he did methodically with the dream of renting a small apartment. In the following notes, I document Rico’s struggle to achieve housing independence after prison.

December 7, 2012

Rico is about to finish his shift at the community clinic. On the street corner outside the office, we are chatting and smoking cigarettes. He tells me enthusiastically that, since he has diligently saved a few dollars each month, he now has enough to put down the first month and deposit and is ready to move into his new place in East Oakland. After work, he plans to pick up a sofa and two couches from a used furniture warehouse downtown. For the job, he has borrowed an old white Toyota pickup truck that is literally falling apart. Because Rico has been without a driver’s license since 1981, he asks me to drive the pickup. At the warehouse, which looks more like a dumpsite beneath the freeway, we laboriously squeeze the oversized sofa and the two couches onto the truck. We then drive to East Oakland through a spectral sprawl of abandoned warehouses and factories. Liquor stores dot the landscape, in front of which congregate hustlers, drug dealers, and homeless people with carts in tow.

Rico’s new one-bedroom apartment, although in desolate surroundings, looks decent. A modest ground-floor unit of a duplex, it is surrounded by a metal fence. The small front yard is unkempt, with tattered furniture and old car parts scattered across the sidewalk. The apartment sits across from the parking lot of an elementary school, which is now bursting with people—most of them Latinos—as the children are getting out.

After bringing the sofa and couches inside, we begin to turn the empty space into Rico’s first living room in years. Shuffling the bulky furniture around takes a good hour. Meanwhile, Rico has been jumping excitedly from one seat to the next, in anticipation of the great times we will have playing games on his PlayStation and chilling together. As he gives me a tour of the other rooms, he repeats that for the first time in years, he feels happy. In the kitchen, he opens the fridge to show me the fresh groceries he bought. Unlocking the kitchen window facing a small backyard, he points to the corner where his grill will go. Then he invites me to the first BBQ he will host to celebrate the new house. 

February 15, 2014 

Last January, the community clinic suddenly dismissed Rico for “lack of funds.” Now out of work and without any source of income, he will be forced to leave the apartment at the end of the month. I drive to his place around noon, but he is just getting out of bed. He is depressed over losing the apartment and looks thinner than the last time I saw him. He stresses that he had done everything he could to do good. While looking for another place to live, he has to find a place to store his recently acquired furniture.

I agree to drive him around East Oakland to find a place to stay. There’s a dilapidated building on Front Avenue, where Rico says rooms rent for $500 a month. A rusted metal gate opens into a messy communal lobby: bags of trash and old furniture are amassed in each corner, cigarette butts litter the carpet, and debris is scattered everywhere. Black plastic bags covering all the windows prevent natural light from entering the building, even during daytime. The 12 single rooms are arrayed along both sides of a long, trash-filled hallway. A large white pit bull with a plastic bottle in its mouth runs back and forth.

I follow Rico to the last room on the left, which is occupied by one of his old friends. Peering through the open doors, I see only decrepit rooms with littered floors. In some, people are sitting on their beds eating, smoking, watching TV, and arguing loudly. All residents of the premises share two bathrooms and showers.  Like the rest of the building, they are filthy. Hip-hop music blasts from the surrounding rooms, including the one we enter. There, two middle-aged white men, whose teeth are mostly missing, are smoking crystal meth. They become nervous at the sight of me, but when Rico reassures them that I’m not a cop, they intently inhale the vaporizing crystals again. After a few minutes of silence, Rico explains that the building was formerly the site of a transitional housing program for recovering drug addicts. Now it is just a ghetto building with cheap rooms for rent. Since Rico is no longer on parole, he cannot go back to the halfway house; moving here may be his only option, because the landlord does not require a deposit or credit report.

The hallway and Rico’s room inside the burned-down building.

October 10, 2014 

Rico has been living on Front Avenue for almost eight months. He covers his rent with monthly General Assistance checks from the county, along with money from odd jobs, hustling, and gifts from friends. In June, the complex caught fire, likely because a tenant had a malfunctioning hot plate in one of the rooms. Rico said that the sprinklers did not work when the fire erupted. Without emergency exits, the tenants had to jump out of their windows to escape the flames.

I arrive at the building around 10 a.m. With half-burned cars, bags of garbage, abandoned appliances, and carbonized furniture accumulating all along the fence, the front yard now resembles a dumpsite more than ever. On the front door a red notice warns people not to enter the building because it is “seriously damaged and unsafe to occupy.” Several people still live here anyway, paying around $300 per month in rent to stay. If tenants have insufficient cash, the landlord accepts food stamps.

Rico opens the gate and lets me into the dark space. As we hug, I can almost feel his bones. He has been losing weight over the last few months and doesn’t look good: his eyes are sunken and he emanates an aura of affliction and weakness. I wonder if his hepatitis might be getting worse. But he claims the situation is simply stressful, and to prove his strength, he starts doing pushups. “I’m alright, bro… See? Still can do these.”

The building has no electricity or heating. In the former communal area, exposed electrical wires are hooked up to some outside source. The smoke-stained walls support a structure verging on collapse. A pungent post-fire odor dominates three months after the flames. Every window is boarded up, and flashlights are needed to navigate around the debris and charred furniture.

Rico’s room feels claustrophobic in the darkness. The furniture from the old apartment barely fits: a small TV, the sofa with the two couches, a microwave, an old coffee table, and a small cabinet. A huge Puerto Rican flag hangs from the wall facing the door. Rico is on the sofa, watching “The Brady Bunch.” I join him and hand him the lottery scratcher and packs of Newport cigarettes I had picked up at the corner liquor store. He has something for me, he says, and produces a black T-shirt with The Godfather written in Spanish from a nearby pile of clothes.

Then he shares news of his new 2015 license plate sticker. The registration fee came from money earned doing plumbing work with his older son. He paid the fee—despite not having a driver’s license—so the cops won’t have another pretext to “fuck me.” Next, he shows me pictures on his cell phone. There is a video of Rico working with his son, as well as a picture of the $400 check he received for the work. After paying $300 in rent to stay in the building, only $36 in “spending money” remain each month from his $336 GA check.

A skinny young man in his mid-20s ambles into the room while we talk. This is Rico’s younger son, who has spent the last few nights in one of the rooms. About a month ago, Rico explains, the Oakland Police Department, the anti-gang task force, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives raided the building. They stormed the place looking for drugs and weapons and took away a few people, thus vacating some of the rooms. During the police raid, Rico escaped through a window in the back of the building.

Rico says the place has become very dangerous lately. With some of the old residents having left or been arrested, new ones have moved in. Most people in the building have guns, and violent incidents have happened with increasing frequency over the past few weeks. Rico feels so unsafe that he has installed two CCTV cameras—one overlooking the front yard and the other covering the hallway. Both are connected to a small monitor in his room, which he keeps on all the time.

Late one night a month ago, the most significant violent incident occurred. One resident had agreed to hide a bag belonging to a man on the run from the police. However, the resident disappeared with the bag, which contained several ounces of marijuana, three handguns, and $10,000 in cash. So the victim threatened to shoot up the building unless his property was returned immediately. Rico attempted to talk to the man and to prevent him from entering the building. An hour later, the man returned with three other heavies, who forced their way past the main gate and into the building. They kicked down doors and beat an elderly black resident almost to death. When they approached, Rico grabbed the .357 he keeps for “self-protection” and sat on the couch facing the door. Rico’s door started to give way under the pounding. He fired several shots and they returned fire as they retreated down the hallway. Outside his room, Rico showed me the bullet holes that pocked the hallway, the bathroom door, and the ceiling. I counted eight holes, but he assured me that many more shots were fired. The door to his room is now broken in half and has four bullet holes in it.

Inside Rico’s room, he shows me his loaded gun. It’s too dangerous to keep anymore, he says, since he already has two gun charges on his record. Another resident—a Latino man in his 40s—enters and asks Rico for some weed. Rico agrees to give him some, but then he tells the man that he expects $10 from him. The guy promises to bring the money soon. When he leaves, I cannot hide my surprise and ask Rico whether he has started dealing again.

He says no.

• • •

As of January 2015, Rico is still living in the burned-out building. As a felon with multiple drug convictions, he cannot apply for subsidized housing. Without a decent job, he will never be able to afford to move to a better place. His only option is to remain in a decrepit building, exposed to chemical hazards, constantly fearing for his life, and inexorably pulled back into the vortex of destitution, hustles, and petty crimes from which he was trying to escape.

References
Beitel, K. 2013. Local Protests, Global Movements: Capital, Community and State in San Francisco. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gowan, T. 2010. Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Roman, C.G. and J. Travis. 2004. Taking Stock: Housing, Homelessness, and Prisoner Reentry. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.
Thompson, K. 2008. Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities. New York: New York University Press.

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. He thanks his research assistants Carla Schultz, Eric Griffin, Hilary Jackl, Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr for their invaluable contribution. For a more detailed description of the project, see here. Read the first entry—“Get a Job, Any Job”—here, and the second one—“The Working Poor”—here.

• • •

Alessandro De Giorgi, “Reentry to Nothing #3 — Home, Sweet Home.” Social Justice blog, 2/9/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

by Gilberto Arriaza*

09/29/2012 School to Jail March. Image by sarah-ji via Flickr.

The arc of the school-to-prison pipeline begins in elementary school and moves through middle and high school. Youth then land in the juvenile legal system and, eventually, in the country’s vast prison system. According to current Assistant Secretary of Education D. Delisle, during the 2009–2010 school year over 3 million students were suspended in the United States, almost 110,000 were expelled, and over 240,000 were referred to the police. The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights reported in 2014 that “Black children represent about 18% of the entire school population, yet 42% were suspended at least once, and 48% more than once.” Although it is male students, mostly Black and Latino, who bear the brunt of this exclusionary system, girls do not lag too far behind. The same office reported that in the year 2011–2012, Black girls were suspended at a rate of 12 percent compared to 2 percent for White girls, and at higher rates than girls of any other ethnicity.

According to Ed. Data research, 30 percent of Latino and 50 percent of Black students in California are currently more likely to be suspended or are subjected to harsher penalties than their White and Asian American counterparts are. In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that school suspensions, as an issue of social control, do not advance education, but instead represent a criminalizing trend. This punitive paradigm seriously deepens the academic gap across socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Numerous studies show that children and youth sent out of the classroom perform poorly academically and fail to graduate from high school at staggering rates. In the 2009–2010 school year, for instance, nearly one of every three Black or Latino students dropped out of California schools.

Clearly, zero tolerance as a strategy of social control—enacted into law by the Free-Gun Schools Act of 1994—applies the harsh approach and philosophy of the adversarial legal system to the educational context. It strongly mirrors the habitual offender laws, better known as three strikes. Evidence illustrates that the current pace of suspensions in schools cannot be sustained. Fortunately, some states have begun to move away from zero tolerance.

The search for intelligent solutions was initially slow, but by 2006, 33 states had incorporated ideas and approaches from restorative justice into their juvenile statutes and public school policies. Joint actions by the Obama administration’s Departments of Justice and Education contributed to the trend. Consequently, states, counties, and school districts have been mandated to rethink the use of draconian modes of discipline against rule-breaking students. Instead, they are encouraged to embrace preventive, restorative approaches.

For instance, Florida’s Broward County recently created a program to aid students who commit offenses that formerly would have ensnared them in the juvenile legal system. The program, Preventing Recidivism Opportunities through Mentoring, Interventions, Support, and Education (PROMISE), seeks to attain “short and long term academic success, aligning best practice models and Restorative Justice principles, and developing pro-social and resiliency skills.” It has its own office in Fort Lauderdale and actively involves the cooperation of local civil rights organizations and schools.

Since 2009, restorative justice has been the official policy of California’s Oakland Unified School District. The model used there includes prevention and supports reentry. This approach seeks to lower suspension and expulsion rates and to foster a positive school climate. It assumes that these conditions will eliminate racially disproportionate zero-tolerance practices and the consequent tracking of students into the prison pipeline.

Such approaches position school districts on the right path. If consistently implemented, schools may begin to rid themselves of zero tolerance as their central social control strategy. But the time has come to go deeper and farther. For starters, school districts ought to begin using the best restorative justice practices developed in international experience and in Native American communities.

A set of at least five fundamental principles must govern any restorative action: all parties implicated in a dispute must participate in well-organized meetings; participation must always be free of coercion; participation is an act of truth telling; the entire restoration processes is public; and the offender must accept responsibility.

A substantial push forward would necessarily go beyond federal government action to include state boards of education, county offices of education, local municipalities, and law enforcement agencies, as well as the advocacy of school district boards of education. These concurrent efforts may be the only way to fully embrace restorative justice and to remove zero tolerance from every school in the country.

References
American Civil Liberties Union (2009). School-to-Prison Pipeline.
California Department of Education (2013). State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Releases First Detailed Data on Student Suspension and Expulsion Rates.
Ed Data (2014). Students by Race/Ethnicity, State of California.
Homeroom (2013). Assistant Secretary Delisle and Youth Lend Their Voices to Combat the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
New York Times (2014). Schools’ Discipline for Girls Differs by Race and Hue.
Pine Ridge Education Center (2014). PROMISE Program.
U.S. Department of Education (2014). Expansive Survey of America’s Public Schools Reveals Troubling Racial Disparities. 

* Gilberto Arriaza (email: gilberto.arriaza@csueastbay.edu) is a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board and professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay. 

Gilberto Arriaza, “Time to Repeal Zero Tolerance in Schools.” Social Justice blog, 1/20/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

Blog by Tony Platt*

Source: torbakhopper HE DEAD on Flickr.

It’s “déjà vu all over again,” said Police Commissioner William J. Bratton following the recent killing of two New York officers. He was referring to the turbulent 1970s, when in response to the supposed targeting of police by Black liberation groups, the law enforcement establishment created, in the words of a former Police Academy commander, a “siege mentality.”

This selective remembering of the past creates a self-fulfilling myth and tells only half the story.

It’s a myth that the targeted killing of police was exceptional in the 1970s or that the era of post-World War II political protest made police work into the most dangerous of occupations. Studies of the killing of police officers between the early 1960s and 1970s show a remarkably consistent rate of death. The rate peaked nationally in 1967, with 29.9 deaths per 100,000 officers, but there was no trend up or down during the decade. By contrast, the rate of death of civilians at the hands of the police gradually increased nationally during the 1960s; and in California, the rate increased two and one-half times in a seven-year period.

Contrary to popular perceptions, there are very few documented cases of politically motivated assassinations of state officials in the United States. According to a study of police killed on the job in California in the 1960s, the majority of killings involved robberies in progress and domestic disturbances; and several cases that resulted from negligence (such as accidental discharge of a gun) and poor practice were misclassified as homicides of police officers.

And although police work was (and continues to be) stressful and often dangerous, other occupations were much more harmful: workers in mines and construction, for example, risked death at a rate between two and three times higher than police officers.

Moreover, although the police may have projected an image of being under siege in the 1970s, it was impoverished communities, especially African Americans, who had to engage in self-defense. Typically, police in the urban North, Mid-West, and West played the same repressive role that sheriff’s departments played in preserving racial order in the South. According to a national study that I worked on in 1968–69, “anger, hatred, and fear of the police are a major common denominator among black Americans at the present time”;  and “the majority of rank and file policemen are hostile toward Black people.” Another study of policing in the summer of 1966 in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC found that 38 percent of police expressed “extreme prejudice” and 34 percent “considerable prejudice” about Black people. In Los Angeles, cops casually referred to their nightsticks as “nigger-knockers.”

And when prejudice turned to violence, African American men were nine or ten times more likely than white men to be killed by the police; and Black youth and the elderly were killed at a rate 15 to 30 times greater than their white counterparts. African Americans constituted ten percent of the US population in the 1960s, but they provided almost 50 percent of the victims of police killings.

The exaggeration of Black attacks on the police and the minimization of the threat posed to Black communities by the police justified an unprecedented, federally funded expansion and modernization of policing in the early 1970s, and a counterinsurgency campaign aimed at progressive Black organizations. From 1971 to 1974, spending on criminal justice increased more than 42 percent, from $10.5 billion to $15 billion, with $8.5 billion going to policing.

As criminologist Paul Takagi predicted in 1974, modernization was likely to make the police more fortified, more dangerous, and more isolated from the communities they policed. Takagi was right. The result was a militarized and antidemocratic institution that resembled an occupying army rather than a public service.

Today, the lack of accountability and transparency is typified in how difficult it is to even get official data about how many citizens are being killed by the police nationwide.

The resurrected rhetoric about the “siege” of the 1970s has the smell of Orwellian logic: making lies sound truthful. Mayor Bill de Blasio is wrong in calling for a moratorium on protest: this is the time to march the streets and raise our voices if we want to make sure that rightwing political forces do not use an isolated and rare example of a killing of two officers, by a likely deranged individual acting on his own initiative, to justify an even more militarized, more undemocratic, and more isolated police force.

* Tony Platt is a criminologist and Distinguished Affiliated Scholar, Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. He is a founding member of Social Justice.

Tony Platt, “No Moratorium on Protest.” Social Justice blog, 12/26/2014. © Social Justice 2014.