There is a lot of lip service paid to “successful” re-entry for former prisoners.  One of the most important findings from recent research suggests that successful prisoner re-entry depends in large part on ensuring that inmates keep connections with family members and friends while they are incarcerated.

Well in D.C. some geniuses have decided to do their best to limit outside contact with inmates by proposing a plan to fingerprint visitors and check for warrants:

All visitors to the District’s jail soon will have their fingerprints scanned and checked against law enforcement databases for outstanding warrants.

The D.C. Department of Corrections is already using the “live scan” fingerprint technology on inmates when they enter and leave the jail, corrections officials said. The digital technology allows the department to take an image of an inmate’s fingerprint and check it against D.C. police databases to confirm the inmate’s identity.

Starting in March, the fingerprint-scanning technology will be put to use for all visitors, DOC spokeswoman Sylvia Lane said.

“Through a $134,000 grant from the [federal] Office of Justice Grants, we will be [using] the technology in our visitors control area to assist [D.C. police] in the identification of individuals with outstanding warrants,” Lane said in an e-mail to The Washington Examiner. If a match is made, DOC will detain the visitor and contact the police department and the visitor will be taken into custody.

The jail currently only requires that visitors present a valid identification, and names of visitors are not checked against outstanding warrants.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/01/dc-jail-fingerprint-visitors-check-warrants#ixzz1BXVgm0Fq

This new policy will continue to expand the reach of the prison industrial complex while also placing more barriers between inmates and the public. First, we already know that many prisoners do not get family or friend visits as it stands now. Our goal should be to encourage MORE such visits rather than putting up more barriers. Next, jails are already overcrowded. Why look to add to the masses of people already locked up by checking visitors for warrants?

Additionally, the company that has created and is selling the scanning technology has a whole new market to access. This illustrates why I believe that prison “industrial” complex is still the appropriate term to be using not-withstanding the fact that the term is not unproblematic. The money-making motive is always intertwined with incarceration.

As some of you may know, the Illinois Legislature took the monumental step of repealing the death penalty in our state. Governor Pat Quinn has the repeal on his desk but is dragging his feet on signing it into law. He has until March 12th to sign the bill. Gov. Quinn needs to hear from you if you are a resident of Illinois. Please call 217-782-0244 and ask him to sign the repeal. It is the RIGHT and HUMANE thing to do.

Matt Kelley has written affectingly about this issue:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the death penalty in Illinois. My first exposure to the issue of wrongful convictions, the issue I focus on in most of my work, was as an undergraduate at Northwestern University. In Professor David Protess’ class more than a decade ago, I heard Dennis Williams speak about his years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. I worked on possible wrongful conviction cases, and celebrated with classmates when former Gov. George Ryan cited exonerations from death row in his decision to impose a moratorium on executions.

But while Ryan’s moratorium was held up as evidence of a crumbling death penalty in the decade that followed, the state quietly refilled its death row. It’s a moratorium on executions, not on death sentences. The state has spent well over $100 million to send 15 people to the purgatory of death row under an ongoing moratorium. Let’s put aside for a moment that the death penalty is wrong; there’s no point in taxpayers bearing the enormous expense of death sentences for people who will probably never be executed. It makes sense — both pragmatically and morally — for Quinn to sign the death penalty abolition bill into law.

Kelley also has posted a short and impactful video illustrating the fact that since 1989, 31 innocent prisoners have been freed from Illinois prisons by DNA testing; 5 of these were on death row.

Please take a couple of minutes out of your day to call Gov. Quinn’s office and ask him to sign the repeal – 217-782-0244.

My friend Lisa pointed me to the following blog post by Nina Simon reviewing a postcard action station that is part of the Unfinished Business exhibit at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum.  I have previously written about my involvement in helping to organize this community-curated exhibit.

From Nina Simon’s post:

The best participatory projects are useful. Rather than just doing an activity, visitors should be able to contribute in a way that provides a valuable outcome for the institution and the wider museum audience. Finding legitimate ways for visitors to be of use is easier said than done. This week, I saw a great example at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum that blew me away with its power and simplicity.

The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is a small historic house dedicated to the story of Chicago’s progressive activists in the early 1900s. The participatory activity in question is part of the new Unfinished Business gallery, a room in which the museum engages with a contemporary issue related to the passion and work of Jane Addams and the historic Hull-House activist residents.

The current Unfinished Business exhibition focuses on the prison industrial complex. It has three main parts: graphic novel-style wall graphics about the history of Hull-House activism related to incarceration and youth imprisonment, an activity station focused on juvenile justice reform, and a second activity station focused on prisoners in solitary confinement at Tamms Supermax Prison. It is this station that grabbed my attention.

The station is a collaboration between the Museum and Tamms Year Ten, an advocacy group that supports prisoners and seeks to expose the injustice with which many are held in solitary confinement. A simple label explains that when Tamms opened in 1998, prisoners were only supposed to be held in solitary confinement there for one year. Ten years later, one-third of the prisoners were still there. Tamms Year Ten runs a number of projects that invite people to write to prisoners, send photographs of the outside world, and advocate for them. The Museum activity label begins:

The Tamms Poetry Committee came together after asking prisoners what people on the outside can do to alleviate the stress of prolonged solitary confinement.

“Send poems!” was one of the answers.

Museum visitors are invited to write poems on postcards and send them to Tamms prisoners. There is a set of books of poetry that visitors can copy from (recommended by the Museum’s poet-in-residence), or they can write their own. Tamms Year Ten provides lists of prisoner names and addresses, and the Museum prints up address stickers that visitors can affix to their postcards. The Museum screens and mails the postcards to the prisoners. Unfinished Business curator Teresa Silva told me that only a handful of postcards have had to be removed for negative or off-topic comments. The majority are beautiful, thoughtfully-rendered postcards. I choked up just looking through a stack. The messages were lovely, but the real power came in the simple address stickers that connected the cards to real prisoners in solitary confinement.

Yes, this activity is political. But it is political in a way that fits right in with the Museum’s mission and history. The Hull-House activists were concerned with creating a compassionate criminal justice system, and that work is by no means “finished” business in this country. Just as visitors to the Monterey Bay Aquarium clamor to take real action to protect the oceans, visitors to the Jane Addams Hull-House respond positively to this opportunity to engage in a bit of progressive, compassionate activism.

From a design perspective, this activity is scaffolded for success. The political nature of the activity is overt, so participating visitors know what they’re getting into. The postcards say right on them “I am sending this poem in solidarity with you.” Furthermore, selecting and copying out a poem from a book is something that most anyone can do. People can decorate their poems as much or as little as they like, and those who choose to take a more creative route and write their own poems or letters are invited to do so. Like the best participatory projects, this postcard activity is constrained but not limiting. The Museum gives people the tools to engage confidently without prescribing the output.

And most powerfully, that output is something useful, something that matters not just to the museum or to other visitors, but to the world. Kudos to the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for such an inspiring call to action.

Special thanks to my friend Jennifer Wisniewski for her generosity in lending her talents to addressing various social justice issues. As part of a project that I am involved with, Jennifer created the following infographic depicting Chicago’s school to prison pipeline. This infographic will be used as part of a larger project to educate youth and adults about the connection between harsh school disciplinary policies and school pushout. I look forward to announcing the launch of that project in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, here is Jennifer’s contribution .

In 1964, a year after the March on Washington and four years before Dr. King was assassinated, there were 81,099 Americans in prison. 27,191 were black. In 2009, there were 1,613,656 prisoners in America. Over 600,000 were black. Over 2.3 million people are locked up in prisons and jails in the U.S. and over 850,000 of these are black. Sociologist Lawrence Bobo explains that “[t]he rise of mass incarceration has had a disproportionate effect on African-American communities, especially those that are low-income.” He adds that “[w]e are at a point where 1 in 15 black men is in jail or prison – and for those between the ages of 20-34, the rate is 1 in 9.”

As one of the most important moral voices of last century, Dr. King spoke of racial and economic justice. He cared deeply about human rights. What would he have to say about America’s prison boom and particularly its destructive effects on poor people in general and poor blacks in particular?

I looked back at some of his words for guidance and offer the following excerpts from Why We Can’t Wait published in 1964 for your consideration:

“Jailing the Negro was once as much of a threat as the loss of a job. To any Negro who displayed a spark of manhood, a southern law-enforcement officer could say: “Nigger, watch your step, or I’ll put you in jail.” The Negro knew what going to jail meant. It meant not only confinement and isolation from his loved ones. It meant that at the jailhouse he could probably expect a severe beating. And it meant that his day in court, if he had it, would be a mockery of justice.”

This excerpt is incredibly rich and ripe for analysis. Dr. King links the jailing of black people in his era with the State’s abiding interest in emasculating black men.

What type of threat does incarceration pose for black people in 2011? Rose Brewer and Nancy Heitzeg (2008) make the case that “[t]he post-civil rights era explosion in criminalization and incarceration is fundamentally a project in racialization and macro injustice.” Michelle Alexander calls it the “New Jim Crow.” These writers and researchers suggest that hyper or mass incarceration has emerged in part as an “indirect mechanism for perpetuating systemic racism.” Recently Bill Quigley advanced fourteen examples of racism in the criminal justice system. These examples support the case made by scholars and social commentators that what we are currently experiencing in the 21st century is as Loic Wacquant has characterized it “a new fourth state of racial oppression.”

Even today there still exists in the South — and in certain areas of the North — the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today — especially in the southern half of the nation — armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro. (King, 1964)

Dr. King references the history of slavery and posits its critical import in understanding black people’s relationship to the criminal legal system. He explains black people’s inherent mistrust of law enforcement as having its roots in slavery and in Jim Crow. The words quoted above have as much relevance in 2011 as when they were first written by Dr. King in 1963. One only needs to think of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and the countless nameless and faceless young people of color who are subjected to the whims of the punishing state and its implementers (police, court personnel, etc…) to grasp the relevance for today.

Since nonviolent action has entered the scene, however, the white man has gasped at a new phenomenon. He has seen Negroes, by the hundreds and by the thousands, marching toward him, knowing they are going to jail, wanting to go to jail, willing to accept the confinement, willing to risk the beatings and the uncertain justice of the southern courts.

There were no more powerful moments in the Birmingham episode than during the closing days in the campaign, when Negro youngsters ran after white policemen, asking to be locked up. There was an element of unmalicious mischief in this. The Negro youngsters, although perfectly willing to submit to imprisonment, knew that we had already filled up the jails, and that the police had no place left to take them.

When, for decades, you have been able to make a man compromise his manhood by threatening him with a cruel and unjust punishment, and when suddenly he turns upon you and says: “Punish me. I do not deserve it. But because I do not deserve it, I will accept it so that the world will know that I am right and you are wrong,” you hardly know what to do. You feel defeated and secretly ashamed. You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force.(King, 1964)

It frankly seems quaint to recall how mass protests for racial and economic justice occurred not that long ago with people who were hoping to be arrested and locked up. Their level of commitment to the cause of social justice was that strong. It is difficult to believe that thousands of people in 2011 would mobilize in this same way to address the injustice of mass incarceration. Yet it is something to strive for.

So it was that, to the Negro, going to jail was no longer a disgrace but a badge of honor. The Revolution of the Negro not only attacked the external cause of his misery, but revealed him to himself. He was somebody. He had a sense of somebodiness. He was impatient to be free. (King, 1964, pp.26-30)

by Nicholas Ganz

There is a certain perverseness to the words above as we consider them in 2011. What we know today is that for some young black boys in particular going to prison has become a more common experience than going to college, joining a union, or doing military service. These young people are not there as resisters in the classic sense. They are the unwilling fodder for an insatiable punishing state that is looking to disappear them. The outstanding question is whether people of color and in particular black people in 2011 are ready to organize a large-scale movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex. The jury is still out on this. It has been written that for Dr.King social justice would not “roll in on the wings of inevitability” but would come through struggle and sacrifice. One would imagine that he would exhort us all today to struggle and sacrifice in order to dismantle the unjust and destructive racial caste system that is a by-product of hyper or mass incarceration. Happy Birthday, Dr. King and thank you! I leave everyone with these powerful words by Dr. King.

I have previously written about a scene in the film “The Interpreter” where Nicole Kidman utters the words: “Vengence is a Lazy Form of Grief.”

I feel the need to resurrect this clip and the words again today.

Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge on someone, on God if they can’t find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There’s an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He’s taken out on the water and he’s dropped. He’s bound so that he can’t swim. The family of the dead then has to make a choice. They can let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they’ll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn’t always just… that very act can take away their sorrow.

When I was a teenager one of my best friends was killed in a car accident. He was hit head on by a drunk driver who survived. I date my introduction to the concept of restorative justice to that time. The grief was overwhelming. None of us who were his friends knew how to get past our anger or how to overcome the sense that we had been robbed. We were struck by the profound unfairness of a 16 year old losing his life.

My friend’s mother did something extraordinary however. She attended the trial of the drunk driver and asked to speak at his sentencing hearing. At that hearing, she asked the judge to show mercy to the man who had killed her son. She told the judge that she could not imagine how the defendant must be feeling for killing her son. She told the judge that she would miss her son forever but that she had already forgiven the defendant.

A few months later, she received a letter from the drunk driver. I never got to see the letter but she later told me that he expressed his profound grief and sorrow over what he had done. He told her a bit about his life and what had led him to drink and drive. He told her that he would do his utmost to live a life of service in the future. They continued to correspond while he was incarcerated and are currently still in touch all of these years later. I learned about compassion, forgiveness and grace from my friend’s mother and the drunk driver.

I am thinking about this episode today because I received a call from a friend last month asking if I would keep a peace circle. She explained that a young man in her neighborhood was shot non-lethally in late November. The shooter was arrested and will be tried later this year. The families of the shooting victim and of the shooter know each other. This incident has caused, as you can imagine, a great deal of anger and has elicited vows of revenge.

I spent part of this past week trying to arrange for a peace circle to take place involving some of the key family members and friends who have been impacted by this incident. Unfortunately, I encountered a great deal of resistance from all sides. Most of the people involved are currently mired in a place of rage and revenge. They expressed to me that they felt betrayed and violated. They thanked me for my willingness to keep a circle for them but told me that they “weren’t ready.” I said that I understood and assured them that I would make myself available whenever they were ready to sit in circle together.

A peace circle wasn’t going to necessarily “resolve” anything for these people. What my friend hoped to do was to lay a foundation or pave a road for the possibility of compassion and forgiveness in the future. She wanted to ensure that a space was opened for communication so as to minimize the possibility of future violence. I fear that these two families are going to embark in a vicious cycle of revenge which will leave only more victims in its wake. My prayer and deepest wish for the families is that they embrace the truth that “vengence is [in fact] a lazy form of grief” and will work to address their grief rather than focus on revenge.

There is nothing easy about these situations. They are messy and we fail. We can’t stay on the mat for too long though. Tomorrow is another day and another opportunity to create more peace in the world.

It’s been a rough week for many in the country. This is one of my favorite poems and it sums up so much about how many might be feeling this week. I share it here with my deepest compassion for everyone who was impacted by the tragic shootings in Arizona.

Unison Benediction

Return to the most human,
nothing less will nourish the torn spirit,
the bewildered heart,
the angry mind:
and from the ultimate duress,
pierced with the breath of anguish,
speak of love.

Return, return to the deep sources,
nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
and still that ancient necessary pain preserve.

Return to the most human,
nothing less will teach the angry spirit,
the bewildered heart;
the torn mind,
to accept the whole of its duress,
and pierced with anguish…
at last, act for love.

~ May Sarton ~

(Collected Poems 1930-1993)

I could not stop laughing at this dramatization of the way that the U.S. is criminalizing children in our schools even though this is a very serious topic…  This needs to be required viewing by educators and parents across the U.S.

A recent article in the Dallas Morning News illustrates how schools in Texas are increasingly criminalizing students as young as 6 years old:

Students in Dallas and other urban school districts in Texas are increasingly being charged with Class C misdemeanors for less-serious infractions that used to be handled with a trip to the principal’s office, according to a new study.

The report from the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Appleseed examined student disciplinary data on 22 of the largest school districts in the state. It found that most have sharply increased the number of campus police officers – resulting in far more misdemeanor tickets being handed out to students.

“Disrupting class, using profanity, misbehaving on a school bus, student fights and truancy once meant a trip to the principal’s office. Today, such misbehavior results in a Class C misdemeanor ticket and a trip to court for thousands of Texas students and their families each year,” the group said in the report, Texas’ School-to-Prison Pipeline.

“Criminalization of student misbehavior extends to even the youngest students,” the report said. “In Texas, students as young as 6 have been ticketed at school in the past five years, and it is not uncommon for elementary school students to be ticketed by school-based law enforcement.”

Black students have been disproportionately ticketed. During a recent school year in the Dallas school district, 62 percent of misdemeanor tickets were issued to black students, even though they make up 30 percent of enrollment.

We really need to stop the madness…

I have previously written more generally about the history of punishing women in the 17^th through 19^th centuries.  I received an e-mail from a reader asking if I had any information about the type of women who ended up as prisoners once gender-specific penal institutions were established in the 1870s.  I looked through a couple of books in my home library and found some interesting facts about the population in women’s prisons from the 1870s to 1910.  Specifically, I offer information here about the women’s prisons in Indiana, Massachusetts, and New York.  I rely on the very good book Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 by Estelle B. Freedman for the bulk of the information in this post.

Please note that the information provided here focuses specifically on inmates in separate women’s prisons.  Most women prisoners across the U.S. during this period (late nineteenth and early 20th century) were actually housed in male penal institutions or houses of refuges along with local jails.  However Freedman (1981) suggests that there was a lot of similarity between the population of early women’s prisons and the general female inmate population.  There were however also some differences between those populations that will not be addressed today.   I hope to return to the topic in the near future and will expand on the differences then.

The majority of inmates in women’s prisons “were under age 25, white, and native-born, although often of immigrant parents.  Nearly two-thirds had been married at some time in their lives, but half of these were widowed, divorced, or separated at the time of their incarceration…Most of the women had no prior convictions, and those who did usually had only one, often for drunkenness.  The crimes for which they were serving in New York and Massachusetts were minor – under 20 percent had committed dangerous offenses against person or property.  Drunkenness and prostitution alone accounted for about half of the commitments.”