In 2006, 16 year old Rennie Gibbs delivered a stillborn baby. After an autopsy, the medical examiner found trace amounts of cocaine in the stillborn child and ruled that this caused the death. Gibbs was charged with “depraved heart murder:”

The grand jury concluded that Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of the baby by smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy. Gibbs, then 16, faced life in prison.

A few weeks ago, a Mississippi judge finally dismissed the murder charge against her. However, prosecutors are suggesting that they may reconvene a grand jury to re-indict Gibbs for manslaughter.

Our failed and punitive ‘drug war’ has conspired to spike the U.S. prison population over the past 40 years. Between 1980 and 2010, the incarceration rate for drug crimes increased tenfold.

The “war on drugs” has really been a war on people and its effects have been particularly devastating for black people like Rennie Gibbs. While blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population and are consistently shown to use drugs at similar or lower rates as others, they comprise almost 1/3 (31%) of those arrested for drug law offenses and more than 40% of those incarcerated for violating drug laws.

A couple of days ago, the London School of Economics released a report declaring the ‘drug war’ to be a huge failure: having wasted money, destroyed lives, and caused more harm than good. They suggest that forty percent of the nine million incarcerated people who are incarcerated worldwide are locked up for drug-related offenses.

Last Thursday, I wasn’t at my best. Days of illness had taken their toll. Yet I’d made a commitment several weeks earlier to teach a session in my friend Amy’s history class at Stateville Prison. It’s been some time since I’ve taught on the inside and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

So I woke up on Thursday, got on the EL, met Amy and Tess, and together we drove out to Stateville. Along the way, I peppered Amy with questions: How many students were there? Would I have access to a computer to play some audio interviews? Could I bring the publications that I had with me inside the prison? She patiently responded to each query.

We arrive and go through the protocols. I leave my cell phone and purse in the trunk of Tess’s car. I store my valuables in a locker inside the visitor’s center. We hand over our identification, sign in and wait to be wanded and searched. We walk through three sets of gates and are checked against various lists. Then we cross through the yard on our way to our makeshift classrooms.

Along the way, we are greeted by various prisoners.”Good morning, how are you?” they call out. Three women (who aren’t guards) briskly walking through a maximum security prison is a happening. Finally, we arrive in the classroom. Tess sets up the audio while Amy and I move the chairs to form a circle. As we work, we’re greeted by a couple of prisoners who engage us in conversation.

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On Tuesday, we tortured a man to death in Oklahoma:

“What was supposed to be the first of two executions here on Tuesday night was halted when the prisoner, Clayton D. Lockett, began to writhe and gasp after he had already been declared unconscious and called out “oh, man,” according to witnesses.

The administering doctor intervened and discovered that “the line had blown,” said the director of corrections, Robert Patton, meaning that drugs were no longer flowing into Mr. Lockett’s vein.

At 7:06 p.m., Mr. Patton said, Mr. Lockett died in the execution chamber, of a heart attack.”

My thoughts about the death penalty are clear. I think that state-sanctioned murder is barbaric and inhumane.

A study by Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State University released earlier this week found that: “at least 4 percent of people who get sentenced to death when they’re convicted would ultimately be exonerated if their cases were closely examined for the next 21 years.”

The study authors suggest that this is a conservative estimate. This news has generally been met with a collective shrug of Americans’ shoulders. And we should be disgusted with ourselves.

The state of Oklahoma has released a detailed timeline of the torture and murder of Clayton Lockett. Read the complete timeline here. An excerpt is provided below:

I noticed that Clayton Lockett was offered a “food tray” twice on the day of his torture. He refused it both times. I’ve been reading recently about death row prisoners’ last meals. Mostly, I’ve been curious about the origins of the ritual. There are many theories about how and why prisoners who were condemned to death began to receive “special meals” on the eve of their executions. All that’s certain is that by the end of the nineteenth century the tradition of “last meals” for the condemned in the U.S. was a firmly established ritual.

Writing in the Journal of American Folklore, Michael Owen Jones (2014) suggests that commentators have offered contradictory explanations for the ritual of last meals:

Karon (2000) suggests that providing a special last meal might be “to sugarcoat what remains a grim act of violence by the state [executing the criminal] to redress a previous wrong.” Focusing on the bureaucratization and routinization of the “new penology” that dehumanizes prisoners turning them into docile automatons, LaChance (2007) contends that the state allows the condemned to choose whatever they wish for a final meal and to speak freely before dying in order to demonstrate that they possess autonomy and agency; as volitional beings who committed heinous crimes of their own free will, they deserve the punishment meted out to them. To sustain the emotional satisfaction required to uphold the death penalty, “[t]he state turns its offenders into self-made monsters” (LaChance 2007:719). In contrast to this interpretation, Gordon (2006) proposes that the ritual of the last meal constitutes “both an implicit call for forgiveness on the part of the citizens of the state” and “a demonstration of forgiveness as well, in that it shows kindness to the condemned and a recognition of their humanity and our shared humanity.”

Regardless of the state’s intentions and ours, Clayton Lockett rejected his ‘last meals’ and this is apparently fairly common. On Tuesday, we tortured a man to death and this too is common…

Yesterday, a new report was released by the National Research Council. The report explored comprehensive data on the rise of U.S. state and federal prison populations from 1973 to 2009 to better understand demographics and the societal impacts of high incarceration rates. Some of the findings will be familiar:

* With the inclusion of local jails, the U.S. penal population totals 2.2 million adults, the largest in the world; the U.S. has nearly one-quarter of the world’s prisoners, but only 5 percent of its population.

* Nearly 1 in 100 adults is in prison or jail, which is 5 to 10 times higher than rates in Western Europe and other democracies.

* Of those incarcerated in 2011, about 60 percent were black or Hispanic.

* Black men under age 35 who did not finish high school are more likely to be behind bars than employed in the labor market.

* In 2009, 62 percent of black children 17 or younger whose parents had not completed high school had experienced a parent being sent to prison, compared with 17 percent for Hispanic children and 15 percent for white children with similarly educated parents.

Below is an infographic from the report: