Sherry Chandler

An e-mail from A Thousand Kites

Dear Friend,

We are calling on poets, writers, singers, and our artist friends to submit a work to Thousand Kites for our national radio broadcast “Calls From Home.”

We hope to record hundreds of poems to reach the 2.4 million people in our nation’s prisons. Will you help? (please forward this email)

All you have to do is call 877-518-0606

You can submit your poem (or read a prisoner’s poem if you have permission) by calling it into our toll-free line and recording it on our answering machine. Don’t worry if you slip up, we will edit all calls.

Ten years ago when prisoners in our region’s newly opened Supermax facilities wrote us about human rights abuses and racism we responded as artists. Soon we witnessed the effect our effort had on our region’s prisons. Light truly is the best sanitizer.

One of the first poems that came back to us from Wallens Ridge State Prison was a gripping poem called “Grave Prison Yard.” We responded by creating a public performance. Hear “Grave Prison Yards” and other poems on our website.

We are asking you to submit a work on the themes of incarceration, family, the power to endure and anything that would lift the spirits and spark creativity in our thousands of prisoner listeners.

Your work will be added to our website, broadcast on over 200 radio stations as part of Calls from Home and released as part of a CD celebrating our ten years of creativity, radio, and the power of community.

Call: 877-518-0606.

Learn more about this project.

Peace,
Thousand Kites Team
thousandkitesproject@gmail.com
www.thousandkites.org

Have the bombers turned into butterflies yet?

Today is my 37^th wedding anniversary, and we are approaching the 40^th anniversary of Woodstock. I’m sure we’re in for a spate of nostalgia and re-assessment. For myself, I’m just sort of stunned that 40 years can go by so quickly. And that the ideals of the nation could have been undermined so totally in those short 40 years.

What I would ask you to look at, 42 years after the Summer of Love, is this Barbara Ehrenreich op-ed in the NYTimes, Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor:

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

Please note, by the way, that San Francisco is now one of the 10 meanest cities. Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair but don’t sit on the sidewalk.

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

These laws against poverty are another facet of our tendency to let prisons “solve” our social problems and so we set up a vicious cycle, create an underclass:

If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them.

. . .

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

And talk about regressive taxation:

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy.

Is this the kind of country we want to be? Is this the kind of country that will stand as a “city on the hill” to lead the world toward democracy? A country where empathy is considered shameful in a judge? Where healthcare for all is somehow both Socialist and Fascist?* A country where Les Misérables is acted out on the streets while it’s acted out on the stage?

I was not at Woodstock, would not have gone if I could have gone. I’m a War Baby, not a Baby Boomer.

But I would say we have rather seriously failed to find our way back to the garden.

_____
*See Frank Rich today for the role of lobbyists in the townhall riots and the healthcare “debate” in general.

It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.

Prisons and Medicaid and, oh yes, global war

What’s wrong with this picture?

Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid:

Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report Monday by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years.

The increases in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by about 25 percent in the past two decades.

As states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults, are driving the spending increases.

What in the world kind of country have we become?

Is this the Reagan revolution?

If so, then certainly it’s well past time for Mr. Obama’s change.

This is wrong, too, a great wrong is being done here:

One in 11 African-Americans, or 9.2 percent, are under correctional control, compared with one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent) and one in 45 whites (2.2 percent). Only one out of 89 women is behind bars or monitored, compared with one out of 18 men.

So are we saying that nearly 10% of our young African-American men are criminals? If that is so, then the fault must be ours.

The picture I see here is one where too many people are poor (Medicaid spending) and too many other people make a living incarcerating the poor.

Mr. Greenwood said prisons and jails, along with their powerful prison guard unions, service contracts, and high-profile sheriffs and police chiefs, were in a much better position to protect their interests than were parole and probation officers.

�Traditionally, probation and parole is at the bottom of the totem pole,� he said. �They�re just happy every time they don�t lose a third of their budget.�

And we have thrown and are throwing trillions of dollars into the money hole of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Changing Lives Through Literature

Read a Book, Get Out of Jail

In a scuffed-up college classroom in Dartmouth, Mass., 14 people page through a short story by T. C. Boyle. They debate the date at which the action is set: when was the Chevy Bel Air released, and what was the drinking age in New York State that year? They question moral responsibility: when the three friends in the Bel Air assault a girl, should peer pressure be blamed for their impulse, or hormones, drink, sin? To which the man at the head of our table rejoins: �There�s a kind of complexity to human experience that isn�t always recognized. You try to figure out who�s right and who�s wrong, but sometimes both are wrong, right?�

Of the 14 people, a dozen are male. One is an English professor, one is a graduate student, two are judges and two are probation officers. The eight othersare convicted criminalswho have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. At each two-hour meeting, students discuss fiction, memoirs and the occasional poem; authors range from Frederick Douglass to John Steinbeck to Toni Morrison, topics from self-�mutilation and family quarrels to the Holocaust and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Robert Waxler, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and the man at the head of the table, founded the reading program in 1991 with Superior Court Judge Robert Kane and Wayne Saint Pierre, a probation officer; since then, it has expanded to eight other states.

Jailing the entire world?

California’s Crowded Prisons

A three-judge panel has tentatively ordered California to reduce the population of its desperately overcrowded prisons by as much as one-third, or as many as 55,000 prisoners, over the next three years. The ruling was an extreme step � but a necessary one. Like many states, California is putting too many people behind bars for too long, and it doesn�t have the money to build more facilities.

. . .

California�s 33 prisons were designed to house 84,000 inmates; they now hold more than 150,000. In some cases, prisoners are being triple-bunked in gymnasiums and other places not intended to be used for housing. There are not enough medical facilities or enough personnel to ensure that prisoners get the mental health and medical treatment they need.

. . .

A large number of California prisoners are behind bars for technical parole violations. Others are in for minor, nonviolent crimes. Inmates like those can and should be released, and given help to reintegrate into society. The state�s limited prison space should be used for people who truly need to be there. It is not ideal when a court has to intervene so directly in managing prisons. But California has been unwilling, on its own, to run a prison system that complies with the Constitution.

There are now 2.3 million people behind bars nationwide � many for nonviolent crimes. And many state prisons are badly overcrowded. Incarcerating people who do not need to be is not only illegal and inhumane, it is a bad crime-fighting strategy.

Among the evils of privatizing government is the notion of prison for profit, which leads to outrages like this:

Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

And yet our wonderful new stimulus package contains a number of what Jeralyn at TalkLeft calls “Let’s Put More People in Jail” grants. As her colleague TChris states:

Job creation isn’t a smart rationale for funding crime prevention grants in the stimulus bill. Congress should instead consider a bill that focuses more specifically and comprehensively on crime prevention. The relative need (or lack thereof) for more police officers, more prisons, more after-school programs, more job training, and more drug treatment centers deserves more carefully considered debate than it can receive when packaged as part of the stimulus bill.

A long article by Bruce Western in the Boston Review last summer begins like this:

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the �basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.� By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, �With the world�s largest prison population,� he said, �our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.� Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison�s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb�s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor�s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.

. . .

The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration�a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.

Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.

We are doing ourselves great harm through these incarceration policies. Western offers an intelligent discussion of alternatives and ways to redeem our past mistakes. I recommend that you read the whole article.

We are currently imprisoning our own citizens, illegal immigrants, and suspected terrorists. Pretty soon, it seems like, our entire society will consist of nothing but prisoners and guards.

Check this out, my loves

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON � The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Imprisoning people has worked out so well here, now I guess we plan to imprison the whole world.

Anybody remember the Soviet Union?

Although it looks like a prison would actually be an improvement:

…hundreds of Afghans and other men are still held in wire-mesh pens surrounded by coils of razor wire. There are only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise, and kitchen, shower and bathroom space is also inadequate.

…

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guant�namo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

Update: And then there’s this from the Boston Herald via TalkLeft, Alabama sheriffs feed inmates on $1.75 a day

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Back in the day of chain gangs, Alabama passed a law that gave sheriffs $1.75 a day to feed each prisoner in their jails, and the sheriffs got to pocket anything that was left over.

More than 80 years later, most Alabama counties still operate under this system, with the same $1.75-a-day allowance, and some sheriffs are actually making money on top of their salaries. But exactly how much is something of a mystery because state auditors do not have access to sheriffs� private accounts.

How could anyone turn a profit feeding men and women for an entire day on less than the price of a Coke and a bag of Fritos? Sheriffs practice Depression-style frugality and rely on such things as day-old bread, cut-rate vegetables and cheap inmate labor.