Many Bahá’ís have been tortured. The body of Dr. Nasir Vafai, a 49-year-old physician who was executed on 14 June 1981, was found to have a deep gash below his abdomen which ran all the way around his leg, severing the joint.
The Iranian authorities are escalating their campaign to achieve their stated goal of blocking the “progress and development” of that nation’s Baha’i religious minority. On May 14, Iranian intelligence authorities arrested six members of a national coordinating group responsible for overseeing the activities and welfare of Iran’s Baha’is. These arrests follow years of increased government surveillance and harassment of Iran’s Baha’is, particularly in public schools and universities. The arrests are ominously reminiscent of the sweeps in the early ’80s which resulted in the arrest and execution of scores of Baha’i community leaders.
For the last 30 years, the Iranian government has attempted to eradicate Iran’s 300,000 member Baha’i community for no other reason than espousing a faith which the government deems to be “heretical”. If you wish to support freedom of belief and conscience for religious minorities, please contact your congressional representative and encourage him or her to become a co-sponsor of House Resolution 1008 if they aren’t already, and urge your representative to help the resolution to pass as quickly as possible. Background on the resolution and a list of current co-sponsors can be found here.
My prayers go out to the Moore family, and I hope that the result of their suit is that no family in NYC has to ever again endure what they endured.
They told Carmichael that if Romona still hadn’t returned by seven that night, marking her gone for 24 hours, she should call the precinct. At seven on the dot, Carmichael called the precinct. A detective told her: “Lady, why are you calling here? Your daughter is 21. These officers should not have taken the report in the first place.” The next day, April 26, the complaint was marked “closed.”
Instead, it was Romona Moore’s life that was closed. While detectives were offering reasons why they couldn’t start an investigation, she spent nearly four days chained up in a basement only a few blocks from her home. She was repeatedly raped and tortured by two young psychopaths who eventually beat her to death on the day that the police grudgingly started searching for her. Her family’s amateur investigation found her before the police did.
Besides her grief, Elle Carmichael was disgusted. The story of Svetlana Aronov was fresh in her mind. Less than two months before Romona Moore vanished in Canarsie, Svetlana Aronov, the white wife of a doctor, went missing on the Upper East Side.
The day after Aronov vanished, police launched a massive search for her and the cocker spaniel, Bim, she had taken for a walk. The NYPD called a press conference, assigned two dozen detectives to the case full-time, and went door to door, passing out flyers with pictures of Aronov and Bim on them. The cops traced the Aronovs’ phone and bank records and analyzed surveillance tape gathered from stores and apartment buildings near her home. A police van emblazoned with the department’s 800 tip-line number drove around her neighborhood, blaring details of her disappearance over a loudspeaker. A letter was sent to rare-books dealers, a business the Aronovs dabbled in. Detectives reportedly even consulted a psychic.
A bloodhound was assigned to track Bim’s scent.
Eventually, Aronov’s body surfaced in the East River. It was never determined whether she fell, jumped, or was pushed into the water.
“I don’t see any other reason but race and class,” Carmichael says of the lack of initial response by the NYPD to the case of her missing daughter. “If this was a white kid, they would never had done this. I had to say to the detectives one day: ‘You know, I feel the same emotions and pain as a white person.’ ”
That’s a common complaint in the city, and a futile one—until now. The story of Romona Moore ended tragically, but almost exactly five years later, a Brooklyn federal judge has, in effect, reopened the case in a historic ruling about racial bias in the search for missing New Yorkers.
Elle Carmichael has received the go-ahead to proceed to trial with a civil-rights lawsuit claiming that the NYPD has a “practice of not making a prompt investigation of missing-persons claims of African-Americans, while making a prompt investigation for white individuals.” Judge Nina Gershon’s ruling is believed to be the first of its kind in the city.
A peculiar claim has been repeatedly asserted by some pundits and journalists during the whole brouhaha over the sermons of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Namely, that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a fringe extremist who preaches an aberrant and inherently racist Black liberation theology. Quite the contrary. The style and content of Reverend Wright’s preaching, and the theology that informs it, far from being an aberration, are archetypal examples of the Black church experience. That anyone would find the content and style of Reverend Wright’s sermons shocking only serves to underscore the fact that not only are many white Americans profoundly ignorant of the day to day realities of Black American life, but they are blithely unaware of the roots of their own national history. Out of the 400 some odd years that people of African descent have been present on the American continent, we’ve only been legally free for the last forty, and the fact that we are now legally free is due in large part to the efforts of the preeminent exponent of Black liberation theology, Dr. Martin Luther King. What other kind of theology could a Black church worthy of the name be reasonably expected to have? Indeed, the primary reason that there is a Black church at all is that for nearly all of its history, most segments of the American church didn’t have a Black liberation theology, when the teachings of Christ clearly demanded that they should. In fact, most churches actively propounded a Black subjugation theology, in keeping with the politics and social mores of their time, and in flagrant violation of the root principles of Christianity. Even today, a significant portion of the American church actively discourages interracial fellowship and intimacy. In South Carolina and Alabama, two states with deeply Christian cultures, over 40% of the white electorate voted against eliminating archaic anti-miscegenation laws from their state constitutions when the issue was put before voters in referenda conducted in the years 1998 and 2000. That fact alone illustrates that for Black Americans, liberation, both spiritual and political, must remain a central concern of their religious lives, as it should for any American Christian, if they are to be true to their professions.
Although America has made enormous strides toward achieving racial justice, what’s been achieved so far is only a promising beginning. Our progress is far from satisfactory. In the face of the clear and compelling evidence of pervasive and continuing racial discrimination faced by Black Americans in nearly every department of life, evidence that only the most cynical and indifferent of Americans could dismiss, the protestations of those who decry the aims of Black liberation theology and dismiss its relevance ring decidedly hollow. Rather than seek to evade responsibility for confronting the church’s past and present failures by implicitly dismissing the entire body of the Black church as irremediably racist, those who seek to exemplify the meaning of the words, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me,” should attend to the great deal of unfinished business before them.
“A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” - Teneva Jordan (H/T to Hardcore for the quote)
To all the mothers out there who struggle, sacrifice, cry and pray to bring their children safely through all of life’s dangers, and especially to my mother, Mrs. Lloyce V. Nelson, no words of thanks are enough.
Neoslavery: the Resurgence of Imprisonment as a Profit-Making Enterprise
Immediately after the passage of the thirteenth amendment, which prohibited slavery in any U.S. state or territory, southern landowners busily set about devising ways to return Blacks to their former condition of servitude. The primary method of re-enslaving emancipated Blacks relied on exploiting an exception built into the thirteenth amendment itself:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
From the late nineteenth century until World War II, Black men throughout the south were routinely arrested on vague and trumped up charges such as “vagrancy” and “drunkenness”, fined outrageous sums, and leased out by local officials to farms, lumber camps, mines and industrial factories, in order to pay off their “debts”. All of this occurred with the cooperation and complicity of the northern states, who stood to earn enormous profits by outsourcing their labor-intensive industrial production activities to southern slavery operations. Today, a similar model prevails, except the supply chain has shifted from the American South to the global southern hemisphere. Although it is common knowledge that exploitative labor practices in countries such as India, Congo and China drive the globalized industrial supply chain, sub-contracting affords multi-national corporations plausible deniability.
At the heart of the neoslavery system stood local law enforcement. The power of sheriffs, deputies and magistrates with respect to Black Americans was arbitrary and absolute. No evidence, no jury, indeed no crime was needed to duly convict any Black man or woman who fell afoul of predacious farm and factory owners. All that was needed was the ability to pay the “fees” arbitrarily imposed on any individual who came into contact with the criminal justice system. That ability rested almost solely with the landowners and companies who leased convicts. The system of fees and fines was so central to criminal justice proceedings that local markets for a type of collateralized debt security sprang up, where Judgments were, “resold at discounts based on the likelihood, or not, of the losing party being able to pay them.”
No appeal or protest was possible. If an individual was unable to pay the schedule of fees and fines imposed, he was promptly sold into bonded labor, where the costs for his “care and upkeep” were continuously added to his original “debt”, ensuring that he would remain in perpetual bondage, until chance or death released him, most often the latter.
Today, the acquisition costs of convict labor makes convict leasing prohibitively expensive for the state run enterprises that use the products produced by prison industries. Indeed, with the advent of globalization and manufacturing outsourcing, there is little use in any industry for the undereducated and unskilled pool of manpower that fills prisons outside of a few sectors like agriculture and tourism, which are more than adequately supplied by migrant laborers. Hence, modern convict labor is primarily employed as a rehabilitative tool. However, the rise of private prisons has made the act of incarceration itself a profitable enterprise, with states providing guaranteed revenue. As noted earlier, the private prison industry has played a key role in the United States’ record breaking incarceration boom, with industry lobbyists pressing legislators to create ever longer sentences for an ever broader schedule of infractions. It is no coincidence that the states with the highest incarceration rates and toughest sentencing laws contain the greatest proportion of private prisons. An article from the magazine Business Weekly succinctly describes the profit opportunity:
According to the Justice Dept., U.S. prisons held about 2.19 million inmates as of midyear 2005, a 2.6% increase over the prior year. From 1995 to 2005, the country’s imprisoned population ballooned by more than 600,000. Even more alarming, at midyear 2005, jail facilities were operating at 95% of capacity.
Florida, one of the nation’s largest prison systems, presents an interesting microcosm of the current crisis. According to the Florida Corrections Dept., the state’s inmate population totaled 84,901 as of midyear 2005, a 3.6% gain from the prior year, a 19.2% rise over the five-year period, and a 37.0% jump over the past decade. Florida estimates that care of each prisoner costs $18,101 annually—nearly $50 per day.
The situation in California, which boasts the country’s largest prison population with about 171,000 inmates, is particularly dire, with many jails already at double capacity. According to the California Corrections and Rehabilitation Dept., the price to the taxpayer for running these prisons totals about $7 billion annually.
Wayne Willems, CEO of Brazos Capital Management, is bullish on the private prison industry because of the favorable supply-demand scenario. “States and the federal government are not willing to spend money to build more prisons, and the private sector is,” he says. “They can take more inmates from state and federal institutions.” Plus, private prison facilities are poised to increase business given the federal government’s plan to catch and retain illegal immigrants, he says.
Black prisoners no longer produce products for others’ profit. They, along with an increasing number of Hispanic immigrants, are themselves the product, and state and federal officials are the buyers. The economic toll of imprisoning the hundreds of thousands of non-violent petty offenders now swelling our nation’s prisons is staggering. The cost to our nation’s public welfare and moral standing is incalculable.
The practice of holding human beings captive for profit is inherently immoral and it has profoundly distorted and corrupted our civic and political life. It is ultimately nothing more than the neoslavery of pre-World War II America in a different form, and the dismantling and banning of all such enterprises, just as was the case with chattel slavery and apartheid in generations gone before, is the preeminent moral imperative of our times.
The campaign to end imprisonment for profit has to be pursued on all fronts. Public information campaigns have to highlight the costliness, destructiveness and corruption of the industry. Voters have to pressure legislators to reject private prison construction in their states, and to pursue effective alternatives to incarceration. Individuals have to make it known to private financial institutions that they are carefully monitoring their banking and investment dollars, and that they will refuse to do business with any entity that finances the private prison industry. Concerned journalists have to inform the public of the ties between the private prison industry, legislators, and financial institutions, and explain how the rise of the for-profit prison industry negatively impacts the electoral process, state budgets, and local communities. If you are reading this blog, I hope you will take the time to share any information and ideas you may have on the subject, and if you are involved in any prison policy initiatives, please take the opportunity to publicize them, both in the comments section and in the forum.
In eras past, Americans struggled against and overcame first chattel slavery and then debt bondage. Today, it is our turn to take up the struggle and resist the criminalization of poverty for profit, for the sake of our nation’s future, as well as our own present welfare.
MP3 of the Day: “A Change Is Gonna Come” - Sam Cooke
It seems the public’s tolerance for private prison operations is not without limits. Public opposition has begun to crystallize around the T. Don Hutto detention center, a medium security prison converted into a detention center for immigrant families. The center is used to hold pregnant women, infants and toddlers in cells designed for adult male felons. It is run by the infamous Corrections Corporation of America. The following short documentary details Hutto’s operations. More information can be found at the Hutto blog. The New Yorker has published an extensive piece on the prison as well.
MP3 of the Day: Sweet Honey in the Rock - “Stranger Blues”
It occurs to me that there are a lot of lurkers out there who peek in on a regular, but don’t always feel like striking up a conversation about the topic at hand. So I added a forum, in the hopes that folks who like the crowd here will strike up some conversations and start interacting with each other. You can talk about whatever’s on your mind, from fashion to philosophy. It’s an open field, all day long. Hope to see some of you there.
Recently, one of President Bush’s judicial nominees, Gustavus Puryear, has been in the news because of his relationship with a private corrections company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in America. Mr. Puryear has served as general counsel for CCA since 2001. He has been nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, the same district where CCA is headquartered. During his tenure as CCA’s general counsel, Mr. Puryear defended the company against scores of lawsuits, many of which stemmed from practices that exemplified the worst excesses of private prison companies. From Jan. 1, 2001 to Dec. 31, 2003 alone, CCA settled 190 lawsuits for a total of $7.39 Million dollars, an astonishing figure considering the difficulty of successfully pursuing litigation against correctional facilities.
Among the cases that CCA settled during that period was a $5 million dollar settlement to a female prisoner who was raped by CCA prison guards, and a $235,000 jury award for medical neglect. Mr. Puryear was remunerated handsomely for his work; since Nov. 2006 he has sold CCA stock valued at over $3 million. Like most corporate officials, Mr. Puryear cultivated close ties with government officials in an effort to influence public policy. He served as counsel to committees chaired by Senators Bill Frist and Fred Thompson, and also served as an advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. These political ties are the apparent reason for his nomination, as Mr. Puryear has almost no experience litigating federal cases.The political favoritism and potential conflicts of interest at play in Mr. Puryear’s appointment are typical of the prison industry’s relationship with the public sector. In fact, the industry increasingly patterns itself after the notoriously corrupt defense contracting industry, where public officials regularly collude with private owners in order to enrich private corporations at public expense. The same pattern of “revolving door” appointments of retired public officials to corporate boards prevails in the private prison industry. For instance, CCA’s board boasts of a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, a former chairman of the congressional armed services committee, and Thurgood Marshall Jr. Indeed, as incidents such as the deployment of forces hired by the private military corporation Blackwater to disaster-stricken New Orleans illustrate, the line between the privatization of public safety and the privatization of national defense is becoming increasingly blurry.
Driven in large part by spending from the Department of Homeland Security, the private detention industry has exploded since 9/11. And companies that previously specialized in defense contracting are increasingly entering into the market for domestic detention and security services. Some of the larger contracts awarded by DHS include:
A $385 million award in 2006 to Halliburton subsidiary KBR to establish temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants
A contract awarded to Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) in 2004 to build immigrant detention facilities worth $109 million over the five year length of the contract. That same year, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a scathing report detailing how juveniles detained in a CSC facility were brutally beaten by guards and how the inmates were forced to live in appallingly squalid conditions.
A contract worth $23.5 million annually awarded to Wackenhut Corrections Corporation in 2007 to build a detention center in Jena, Louisiana. This is just one of multiple government contracts awarded to Wackenhut by DHS from 2003-2007, despite the fact that Wackenhut repeatedly failed to adequately fulfill its contractual obligations to provide security services to numerous vital government facilities, including nuclear plants, Army bases, and DHS itself. Wackenhut, like most private prison corporations, also has a long and notorious record of abusing and neglecting inmates in its facilities.
It goes without saying that the expansion of the private prison industry has been driven by harshly punitive criminal justice policies that largely target politically weak poor minority communities. In fact many leaders of the private prison industry have been active in helping to craft the legislation that has made the United States the world’s leading jailer. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a highly influential political organization that has been a vocal proponent of “tough on crime” laws that do little to deter crime, and do much to swell the prison population. ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force has among its members representatives from CCA and Wackenhut. Many pieces of legislation that ALEC has championed, such as “three-strikes” laws, are a major part of the reason that the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world.
The industry appears to be adding further fuel to its growth through the detention of immigrants. For instance, when President Bush first proposed to increase spending on immigration enforcement in 2006, CCA’s stock climbed by %27 over a five month period. With the costs of detaining immigrants estimated to be $1 billion annually, the industry is in a position to continue to reap significant profits from immigration enforcement.
However, the profits earned by a handful of corporations pale beside the social costs of our nation’s profit driven incarceration frenzy. The opportunity costs of diverting public funds from community development to funding prisons; the devastation of countless families caused by the needless imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of young Black men; the senseless dislocation of thousands of immigrant children; the distortion of our electoral process caused by adding prisoners to the census counts of electoral districts, as well as the permanent disenfranchisement of millions of ex-felons, including 1.4 million Black men, will all make their repercussions felt for decades to come.
Public safety and national defense are among the most important functions that our government provides, and their privatization and fusion are among the most dangerous trends our nation faces. If Americans don’t relentlessly pursue electoral reforms that permanently and rigidly exclude the influence of wealthy corporations on the electoral process, it may not be long before all of us are literally corporate slaves, just like hundreds of thousands of the men and women currently inhabiting our nation’s prisons.
A couple of months ago I copped Saul Williams’ latest joint The Inevitable Rise and and Fall of Niggy Tardust. Like all of Saul’s work, it’s thought provoking stuff. The lyrics are laced with images of the repressed spirituality that is reflected in commercial hip-hop’s distorting mirror. A lyric from one of my favorite tracks goes:
“But I’m fearless/Sometimes I feel alone, homeless, peerless/What will it take to shake the land for everyone to hear this?/I can’t bear this!/Born of pages torn from ancient prayer lists/Descendant of the womb the lotus blooms when I come near it/I declare it/Time to re-align karat to carrot/What was olden remains golden/sceptered tongue I dare to share it/all who hear it know at once/royal highness over blunts/Thug of Thugs Pimp of Pimps/platinum tongue and ivory fronts”
[Contains Explicit Lyrics]
Ironically, despite being distorted almost beyond recognition, that same spirituality accounts for commercial hip-hop’s success. Even a match shines brightly in pitch darkness. Saul is keenly aware of that irony; his whole album is steeped in it. The Album’s title character “Niggy Tardust”, is sort of a latter-day Jes’ Grew personified, scorned and downtrodden, but as the album title says “inevitably rising”. He embodies the paradox of contemporary Black America’s reality: we provide the power to move the masses, but we don’t control and direct it.
[Contains Explicit Lyrics]
It doesn’t have to be that way though. When we awaken to the fact that our culture, our heritage, our spirit, can do much more than sell products and move kids from Norway to Japan to nod their heads to African beats, we’ll be ready to make our own history.
MP3 of the Day: “Black History Month” - Saul Williams [Contains Explicit Lyrics]
Occasionally, like many bloggers, I browse through the search terms that bring people to my blog, and inevitably the list contains a lot of weirdness. One search however has me really puzzled. Apparently not only is “confederate flag items cheap” one of the top twenty search terms that brings people to my blog, my blog is one of the top ten results for that search. As an aside, I always wonder what goes through people’s minds when they’re searching for white supremacist sites and they click through to my blog, which happens fairly regularly ever since I wrote that post about the N-word. That, and click-thrus from searches for interracial pornography. I like to flatter myself and imagine that I’m helping to create some serious cognitive dissonance within a few racists and perverts.
At any rate, I wonder what it is about my blog that makes Google think that it ought to be one of the top ten results for “confederate flag items cheap”. Does my blog really match the profile of a purveyor of discount rate Confederate memorabilia? Is something about my writing evocative of “Black Snake Moan”? Or is Google really that busted?
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