Mass incarceration and the cradle to prison pipeline
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A presentation on mass incarceration, the cradle to prison pipeline, and the prison industrial complex. With a special emphasis on Washington state and King County. And on juvenile justice.
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Mass incarceration and the cradle to prison pipeline
- 1. Mass Incarceration and the Cradle to Prison Pipeline What is it, how we got there, and what do we do about it
- 2. Mass Incarceration • Historical Circumstances • Prison Industrial Complex
- 7. History • Civil War • Black Codes • Reconstruction Abandonment • Poverty Codes • Jim Crow • Civil Rights Movement 1955-1970 • Black Panthers Crackdown • Repealing Gains in Civil Rights Movement
- 8. This is the creation of mass incarceration
- 9. Prison Industrial Complex • Incarceration rates are predicted off of 3rd or 4th grade reading levels • Prisons are built • Contracts are made to ensure economic advantage to the state • Prison Industrial Complex providers • Starbucks • Microsoft • And more • Private Prisons –Post-Industrial Complex
- 10. Mass Incarceration Witness • Our federal prisons are operating at 130% of capacity. • The US holds 25% of the world's incarcerated people, we are 4.46% of the world's population
- 11. Prison Industrial Complex • Marriage of prison and industry • Industries created just for prisons • CCA • JPAY • Prison Labor
- 13. Cradle to Prison Pipeline Rather than embarking on a path to college and success, from birth children-of-color are funneled down a path toward prison. Institutional racism and poverty conspire to place these youth at disproportionate risk than whites. The entry-points to the cradle-to-prison pipeline are many and every further step into its realm magnifies its impact upon the life of a youth.
- 15. Cradle to Prison Pipeline Witness 5 year old arrested for assaulting an officer 6 year old arrested for having a tantrum 5 year old arrested for having a tantrum 5 year old autistic child arrested for having a tantrum
- 16. Cradle to Prison Pipeline Witness: WA • Education Spending Trends In the 1999-2000 period, Washington ranked 15th among the states in state and local government K-12 education spending per capita. In fiscal year 2010 Washington was ranked 32nd. Incarceration Spending Trends "Washington, too, spends an excessive amount of money housing prisoners. The Vera Institute for Justice calculated the taxpayer costs for housing one person in Washington prisons. Their final tally: more than $46,000 a year for one prisoner. Or, to put it differently, the same cost for three undergraduate students to attend the University of Washington...." 1/10/2013
- 17. Systemic Oppression • Macro Level Contributors • Retributive justice policies • Neighborhood policing strategies • Poor education • Zero tolerance policies • Out of school suspension • Dismantling welfare without providing alternatives or assessing the impact on underserved communities
- 18. Systemic Oppression • Micro Level Contributors • Poverty • Poor family functioning • Healthcare • Childhood trauma (92% of incarcerated youth have been traumatized) • Juvenile justice involvement
- 19. Systemic Oppression • Systemic Racism
- 20. Juvenile Justice • Nearly 2 million juvenile justice cases are handled each year • Children of color are overrepresented in the system overall by a 2:1 ratio—despite comprising only 1/3 of American youth • An African American boy born in 2001 has a one-in-three chance of being imprisoned in his lifetime; a Latino boy one in six • Youth of color face “cumulative disadvantage” once in the system: • Black youth are 4 times more likely to be in juvenile detention • 77% of juveniles sent to adult prison are African American
- 21. State of Our Youth 49% of incarcerated youth in Washington are youth of color
- 22. Washington State • Persistent Over-representation of youth of color • African American youth are nearly twice as likely as white youth to be arrested • African American and American Indian / Native Alaskan youth are more than twice as likely to be referred to court as white youth • Diversion • With the exception of Asian/Pacific Islanders, youth of color are less likely to receive a diversion • Transfers to the Adult System • African American youth make up 31% of the transfers to adult court while they are only 6% of the juvenile population
- 23. Cumulative Effects • Washington • 81.2% White • 4% African American • 11.9% Latino
- 24. Cumulative Effects • King County • 70.8% White • 6.6% African American • 9.3% Latino African American 42% Caucasian 35% Asian/Pacific Islander 7% Hispanic 11% Native American 3% Other/Unknown 2% African American Caucasian Asian/Pacific Islander Hispanic Native American Other/Unknown
- 25. Solutions
- 26. Moving Forward • Local Solutions • Communal Solutions • State-Wide Solutions • National Solutions
- 27. Local Solutions • Local is you! • Mentoring • Know the issues • Vote with compassion • Delve into complex issues • Undo systemic racism where you can • Learn your own privilege • Volunteer in schools • Donate
- 28. Communal Solutions • Communal is you! Is the church! • Remove the stigma of incarceration • Undergo educational programs • No New Jim Crow • Witnessing Whiteness • Go into the detention system and directly serve youth • Become a safe space for those affected by incarceration • Enact communal restorative justice practices • Enact local policies such as “ban the box” • Reject local policies such as “no smoking in the park”
- 29. Values Based Solutions • Individualization • Humanity • Parsimony • Proportionality • Regularity
- 30. Policy Changes: National and State • Repeal three-strike, mandatory minimums, and similar laws • Those we don’t repeal, should be narrowed significantly
- 31. Policy Changes: National and State • Those that are not repealed or narrowed, should be amended so that the judge may enact other sentences “in the interest of justice” • Life without parole should be repealed or narrowed • Truth in sentencing should be repealed (sentencing tends to be towards published max) • Lower maximums especially with regard to non violent offenses • All states should have a sentencing commission and should produce sentencing guidelines
- 32. Policy Changes: National and State • Every state should have a parole board with guideline systems • Every state should have a goal of cutting its incarceration rates in half by 2020 • Every state should have automatic early release review when a sentence served equals five years; unless they are 35 years or older, in which case it would be three years
- 33. Resources • http://www.law.seattleu.edu/Documents/korematsu/JuvenileJustice/FINALReportJuvenileJusticePresentation.pdf • http://www.kingcounty.gov/courts/JuvenileCourt/Reports.aspx • http://www.aecf.org/resources/youth-incarceration-in-the-united-states/ • http://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html • http://www.law.washington.edu/About/RaceTaskForce/preliminary_report_race_criminal_justice_030111.pdf • http://www.xpowerpoint.com/The-Cradle-to-Prison-Pipeline-Powerpoint--PPT.html# • http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53/53033.html • http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53000.html • http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/12078248_f520.jpg • http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screen-Shot-2015-02-12-at-3.05.01-PM.jpg • https://defacingcurrency.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/prison_pie_chart.jpg • http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289 • http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/ • http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/education-vs-incarceration_502918ab0800d.jpg • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EIZk_JdjQ • http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html • https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B02aYxNomoKqWnJLYkZJdHBlb3c/edit
Editor's Notes
- 2.5 million people incarcerated in the US
- We had the civil war, the emancipation proclamation, and the end of slavery. And for a brief moment of time after the civil war, we tried to integrate and to create a more just society during reconstruction. Freedom for African Americans lasted for about a heartbeat. Starting in 1865, Black Codes were passed by Southern states that had the intent of restricting African American’s freedom and compelling them back to work on the plantation. Black codes were developed because after being slaves and being forced to work all the time, African Americans were exhibiting anti capitalistic behavior! Mothers wanted to stay home with their children. Fathers wanted Sundays off. There was a massive work slow down. Former slaves were rebelling against the slave economy and against capitalism. Black Codes were copied directly off of the slave codes and implemented quickly. Then, a mere 15 or so years after the civil war ended, we gave up on reconstruction, Jim Crow laws began to pop up across the United States. Why? Because African Americans were gaining too much progress in power circles by being elected to Congress and to the Senate. Laws such as separate lunch counters for white and black. Separate drinking fountains. Separate waiting rooms in bus terminals. No interracial marriages, totally segregated schools. It became illegal to be black and unemployed. Or black and resting on a public bench. Or black and loitering. Or black and vagrant. Justice was rough. Lynching became popular in the south and laws were passed that gave white people privilege over black people. You get the picture. It was not our finest moment in American history. Unfortunately, this moment in history lasted until the civil rights movement started going full speed in 1955 in Brown vs. the Board of Education. The period of Jim Crow laws stretched nearly 80 years before victories were had in court and in political circles that began protecting African Americans and began to strike down these laws with the culmination of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And it took years after this to untangle all the institutional challenges coming forth from the states. Then, when the Black Panthers began to rise to power as a community organization, they quickly became criminalized. They originally developed to protect African American neighborhoods from acts of police brutality. Well, when you are willing to fight the police, you then become the criminal. Couple that with their adoption of Marxist philosophy, and you can practically hear the power structures trembling with a desire to eradicate them. And so it continues. Today, we have discarded black codes in favor of poverty codes. So rather than rewrite laws in such a way that we can address the root cause of loitering, vagrancy, and unemployment, we are simply arresting more people. And we have, of course, enacted the war on drugs. In 1971, President Nixon, declared a war on drugs. Mandatory minimums, taking away judicial discretion with regard to drug involvement, were first enacted in 1973 in New York and then spread across the United States. The problem with mandatory minimums and the war on drugs is that study after study show that all ethnicities use drugs equally. And yet African Americans are incarcerated at higher rates than any other ethnicity. We have simply expanded black codes so that we are arresting more people rather than dealing with the roots of slavery and the issue of being African American in today’s United States. Now, nearly every marginalized community is incarcerated at higher rates than those of the dominant, Western European, cisgendered, heteronormative society.
- 11 “blues” = black codes
- Nationally, 1 in 3 Black and 1 in 6 Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime. While boys are five times as likely to be incarcerated as girls, there also is a significant number of girls in the juvenile justice system. This rate of incarceration is endangering children at younger and younger ages. This is America's pipeline to prison — a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment and often premature death. Although the majority of fourth graders cannot read at grade level, states spend about three times as much money per prisoner as per public school pupil. Incarceration rates are predicted off of 3rd or 4th grade reading levels Prisons are built Contracts are made to ensure economic advantage to the state Prison Industrial Complex providers Starbucks Microsoft And more Especially egregious is phone company contracts It can cost up to $17 for a 15 minute call. The FCC capped state-to-state calls at 25 cents per minute, but there is no cap for calls within states. Most people are incarcerated in the state that their family is in. Private Prisons –Post-Industrial Complex
- Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then “hired out” for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of “hired-out” miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972. During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. “Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex,” comments the Left Business Observer. Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month. 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. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq. [Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here).” http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
- Witness to the cradle to prison pipeline Five year old African American young man arrested in Florida for assaulting an officer Six year old African American boy arrested in Missouri for a temper tantrum in which property was damaged, but nobody was harmed. Five year old African American girl arrested in Florida for having a temper tantrum at school. Five year old autistic child arrested in Brooklyn for having a temper tantrum at school. And in Alton, Illinois, an 8 year old girl with autism was arrested for having a temper tantrum. In all cases, no harm came to people.
- Witness: Spending Trends in Washington First, the weight of the evidence indicates that, on average, per-pupil expenditures are related to student outcomes. Second, the effect appears to be stronger in lower school grades than in upper grades And yet, incarceration tax payer costs are up from $575 per household on the criminal justice in 1980 to $1,250 spent in 2009. Even while crime rates have dropped 43%. "Washington, too, spends an excessive amount of money housing prisoners. The Vera Institute for Justice calculated the taxpayer costs for housing one person in Washington prisons. Their final tally: more than $46,000 a year for one prisoner. Or, to put it differently, the same cost for three undergraduate students to attend the University of Washington...." 1/10/2013 Education spending has dropped relative to other states. In the 1999-2000 period, Washington ranked 15th among the states in state and local government K-12 education spending per capita. In fiscal year 2010 Washington was ranked 32nd. And in 2013, we spend even less per student than we did in 2010 while we increased our ranking from 32nd to 30th. http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html
- 1. Individualization. To be just, sentences should be individualized to take account of the circumstances of the crimes for which they are imposed and the characteristics of offenders. 2. Humanity. Sentences should be tailored to address the needs of offenders and the deficits in their lives that contributed to their offending. Everyone has an interest inoffenders becoming law-abiding citizens who live conventional lives and play positive roles in their families and communities. Everyone, their fellow citizens and returning citizens have an interest in reducing reoffending. Being convicted and spending time in prison, however, makes many offenders more, not less, likely to commit new crimes(Nagin, Cullen, and Lero-Jonson, 2009). 3. Parsimony. Sentences should be no more severe, intrusive, or damaging to an offender’s ability later to live a law-abiding life than is minimally necessary to achieve valid purposes of the sentence he or she receives. In the 1950s and 1960s, the phrase “least restrictive alternative” was used to express this idea (Advisory Council of Judges, 1972). Jeremy Bentham (1970 [1789]) two centuries ago used the term “frugality.” Imposition of a sentence more severe than is necessary is cruel—gratuitous suffering without need or justification. Such sentences are by definition unjust. They are also wasteful because they require expenditure of public funds for no good purpose. 4. Proportionality. Sentences should be proportioned in severity to the seriousness of the crime. 5. Regularity. Properly defined ranges give transparency, fairness of procedure, and provide accountability to judges.