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Sunday, August 9th, 2009
6:54 am	A Crime to be Poor? Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? By BARBARA EHRENREICH IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.” 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. That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.” 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. If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job. For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching. For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization — one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail. Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you’re in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.” By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton. Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you’re littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking “overly anxious” in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police “can force you to stop just to investigate why you don’t want to talk to them.” And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.” There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children’s Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours. In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008. Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school. 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 if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing. Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet. 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. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons. A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.” But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt. Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.” (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
7:45 am	The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 Jim Webb's Website | Contact Senator Webb on This Issue | Subscribe to eNewsletter | The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process. Why We Urgently Need this Legislation: With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country. Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society. America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives. We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
5:38 am	Finding Hope at the Library For some career Library staff (Portland, OR) this is familiar news for decades. Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries By SUSAN SAULNY and KAREN ANN CULLOTTA ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. — The public library here had just closed its doors one evening in December when two homeless men who had been using the stacks as shelter from the cold got into a fight on the outside steps. What began as bickering took a violent turn when one of the men pulled out a knife and stabbed the other six times, leaving him bleeding beside the book drop. Like libraries across the country, Arlington Heights Memorial had strived to keep pace with the changing times, ensuring its relevance in the digital age by becoming something of an indoor town square, and emphasizing that its money-saving services catered to the community’s needs. These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed. As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have come to fill a void for more people, particularly job-seekers and those who have fallen on hard times. Libraries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years. But in some cities, this new popularity — some would call it overtaxing — is pushing libraries in directions not seen before, with librarians dealing with stresses that go far beyond overdue fines and misshelved books. Many say they feel ill-equipped for the newfound demands of the job, the result of working with anxious and often depressed patrons who say they have nowhere else to go. The stresses have become so significant here that a therapist will soon be counseling library employees. “I guess I’m not really used to people with tears in their eyes,” said Rosalie Bork, a reference librarian in Arlington Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. “It has been unexpectedly stressful. We feel so anxious to help these people, and it’s been so emotional for them.” Urban ills like homelessness have affected libraries in many cities for years, but librarians here and elsewhere say they are seeing new challenges. They find people asleep more often at cubicles. Patrons who cannot read or write ask for help filling out job applications. Some people sit at computers trying to use the Internet, even though they have no idea what the Internet is. “A lot of people who would not normally be here are coming in to use the computers,” said Cynthia Jones, a regional branch manager in St. Louis. “Adults complain a lot about kids just playing games and you know, ‘I need to do a résumé, or ‘I need to write, I need some help,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “There’s a bit of frustration.” Ms. Jones instructed her staff to tread carefully. “You don’t want to upset people,” she said. “You don’t know what might set somebody off.” Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, said résumé writing had become a major use of library computers, and every librarian in the system had received training in how to better assist patrons conduct job searches. The 40 million visits to New York libraries over the past year, he said, is the greatest ever in a 12-month period. Here in Arlington Heights, newly homeless patrons are showing up in their business suits, said Paula Moore, the library’s director. “They are living in their cars after losing a job they had for a number of years,” Ms. Moore said. The American Library Association does not keep statistics on incidents in and around libraries, but anecdotal evidence from around the country suggests that some libraries are struggling with their newfound popularity and the social ills that can come along with it. In Los Angeles, the police say the Central Public Library has become a magnet for thieves, and that, excluding shoplifting at stores, there were more thefts of personal property at the library last year than any other location in central Los Angeles. “We hope things get better,” said Lt. Paul Vernon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, noting the difficulty of policing libraries. “The library is a place where people tend to congregate, and from a public and government standpoint, you can’t really restrict people.” In Sacramento this year, two branches of the public library temporarily stopped accepting cash as fines for overdue books, after thieves struck three times since June — in one instance, taking off with a safe filled with money. In Lynchburg, Va., a gunman shot a man outside the public library on a Monday afternoon in late January. The victim, who survived, staggered into the library bleeding and looking for help. Since then, an off-duty police officer has been hired by the library for extra security. And in Quincy, Mass., where a man was recently arrested in the library and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, among other offenses, a police officer on beat patrol now walks through the library during operating hours. Though homelessness is not new to Arlington Heights, security at the library has been tightened since the stabbing. (The man was charged with attempted murder, and the victim survived.) Although such violence is unusual, a library patron, Judi Crawford, said the scene around the building still made her uncomfortable. “I don’t like my 16-year-old son to study at the library at night anymore,” Ms. Crawford said. “If he is studying here, I make sure he stays inside until he sees me pull up, and he can just run out and get in the car.” Other things have changed at the library here, too. It has tried to anticipate the new needs of its neighborhood. Next to its welcome desk, it created a job-search desk, and it has recruited volunteer professionals to review résumés, set up a support and networking group for the unemployed, and assembled a Web site offering the best of its online resources. Officials said the library was experiencing double-digit increases in the circulation of DVDs, CDs and books on tape. The library’s many children’s programs and cultural arts events are also filled to capacity, reflecting a growing demand, linked to the economy, for free entertainment. With an estimated 2,500 patrons visiting the library every day, employees must now park at a parking lot at a nearby church. “When you walk by our new job-search desk, you see people in line and even waiting on the benches for assistance,” said Ms. Moore, the director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. A therapist is planning to give a workshop at the library called “Finding Hope After Losing a Job,” while also offering advice to library employees who are increasingly being thrust into the role of first responder to emotionally distraught patrons who view them as confidantes. “I’ve had people come in and talk for hours,” said Barbara Vlk, a librarian specializing in business at Arlington Heights. “More and more people are in need of help and direction.” Malcolm Gay contributed reporting from St. Louis. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
7:47 am	Preaching at the American Gulag Billy Talen Posted on Facebook The harvesting of prisoners from the asylum-seekers at airports, or the pulling of fathers from their wives and children in the middle of the night, or raiding a work-place - the New York gulag bags its bodies. Survivors of ICE (Immigration Correction Enforcement) spoke this weekend in front of two of these "Detention Centers" at 201 Varick in NYC's west village, and the Correction Corporation of America's (CCA) for-profit prison out in Elizabeth, New Jersey. We worked with the American Friends Service Committee for research and finally the contacting of the families and brave witnesses who spoke through our bullhorn. Trying to sing our gospel songs ("We dance the day you are free, the jailer wandered off, and we found the key, so glad to have you back again!") as loud as we could, the whole enterprise pushes at the inertia of cruelty. You can't really negotiate with it. We DO have President Obama's closing of Guantanamo, and so we say "Now close our local Gitmos..." But the dispiriting betrayal of everything American by a very large and well-funded group of casual sadists... we found ourselves losing control of our emotions. The stories from Ravi and from Abdulai - stories of a hidden world where the most vulnerable and trusting people, believing in our country's history and seeing Lady Liberty raise her torch - are taken to faceless warehouses, without explanation, with wrists and ankles shackled, strip-searched, humiliated... All this takes place hidden in plain sight. Our city's soul is compromised. Something in the air is amiss. Our only response can be to isolate from our environment. Withdraw from the possibility of being out in public space as a witness to the cracks in these monumental buildings, where tender ears might have heard New Yorkers who tried to live up to the city's famous boldness with a demand for the freedom of the innocent. We have a great deal to answer for. The people taken to the darkness, charged with nothing, caught in Catch-22's, surrounded by Orwellian double-speak calmly repeated by exhausted cynics... we have not done the job of ordinary citizenship. We carry this in ourselves and our city's brashness becomes sentimental nonsense. All we could do this weekend was cry and shout, hug the families as they came out from their visits, sing echoes up the sides of the buildings hoping they heard. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
6:24 am	Prisons: Only Medicaid Costs More Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid By SOLOMON MOORE One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study. 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. States have shown a preference for prison spending even though it is cheaper to monitor convicts in community programs, including probation and parole, which require offenders to report to law enforcement officers. A survey of 34 states found that states spent an average of $29,000 a year on prisoners, compared with $1,250 on probationers and $2,750 on parolees. The study found that despite more spending on prisons, recidivism rates remained largely unchanged. Pew researchers say that as states trim services like education and health care, prison budgets are growing. Those priorities are misguided, the study says. “States are looking to make cuts that will have long-term harmful effects,” said Sue Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States. “Corrections is one area they can cut and still have good or better outcomes than what they are doing now.” Brian Walsh, a senior research fellow at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, agreed that focusing on probation and parole could reduce recidivism and keep crime rates low in the long run. But Mr. Walsh said tougher penalties for crimes had driven the crime rate down in the first place. “The reality is that one of the reasons crime rates are so low is because we changed our federal and state systems in the past two decades to make sure that people who commit crimes, especially violent crimes, actually have to serve significant sentences,” he said. Over all, two-thirds of offenders, or about 5.1 million people in 2008, were on probation or parole. The study found that states were not increasing their spending for community supervision in proportion to their growing caseloads. About $9 out of $10 spent on corrections goes to prison financing (that includes money spent to house 780,000 people in local jails). 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. Georgia had 1 in 13 adults under some form of punishment; Idaho, 1 in 18; the District of Columbia, 1 in 21; Texas, 1 in 22; Massachusetts, 1 in 24; and Ohio, 1 in 25. Peter Greenwood, the executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Evidence Based Practice, a group that favors rehabilitative approaches, said states started spending more on prisons in the 1980s during the last big crime wave. “Basically, when we made these investments, public safety and crime was the No. 1 concern of voters, so politicians were passing all kinds of laws to increase sentences,” Mr. Greenwood said. President Bill Clinton signed legislation to increase federal sentences, he said. “Now, crime is down,” Mr. Greenwood said, “but we’re living with that legacy: the bricks and mortar and the politicians who feel like they have to talk tough every time they talk about crime.” 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.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
12:35 pm	Alaska: DNA Evidence Disallowed to Clear Convicted The Right to DNA Evidence Alaska is one of six states that do not have laws giving prisoners’ access to DNA evidence that could establish their innocence. The Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in a case brought by an inmate who argues that he has a constitutional right to test crime-scene DNA that could help him overturn his rape conviction. A federal appeals court ruled in his favor. The Supreme Court should affirm that ruling. In 1993, an Anchorage prostitute was attacked by two men and raped. A man named Dexter Jackson confessed and named William Osborne as the second attacker. Mr. Osborne, who had no criminal record and was serving in the military, was convicted, based partly on a DNA test of biological material from a condom recovered at the scene. The state used an old method, known as DQ-alpha testing, that could not identify the person to whom the DNA belonged with great specificity. Mr. Osborne is now seeking to do an STR test, a more precise, cutting-edge form of DNA testing, on the same material. If he is innocent, the STR test could prove it definitively. But the Alaska state courts rejected Mr. Osborne’s request. According to his lawyers, Alaska is the only one of the six states without DNA testing laws that has never conducted a postconviction DNA test, either by court order or by consent of the state. Mr. Osborne went to federal court, where he argued that Alaska’s refusal to allow him to test the material deprived him of his 14th Amendment due process rights. He also argued that the results of the STR test could be run through an F.B.I. database to identify the person who actually committed the crime. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled for Mr. Osborne. The appeals court relied on the broad principles that the Supreme Court laid out in the landmark 1963 case Brady v. Maryland. In Brady, the justices recognized that the due process clause requires the state to hand over to a defendant before trial any evidence it has that he is innocent. The Ninth Circuit concluded that due process should also require the state to hand over exculpatory evidence after conviction. DNA testing is the most powerful forensic method for separating the innocent from the guilty. Postconviction DNA testing has exonerated at least 227 innocent people, according Mr. Osborne’s lawyers. If a state has biological evidence that could prove innocence, it has a moral — and constitutional — duty to make that evidence available for testing. Postconviction DNA testing is also valuable because it can help capture the guilty. As a group of prosecutors, including former Attorney General Janet Reno, have pointed out in a friend-of-the-court brief, often when a prisoner is exonerated through DNA, it leads to the real perpetrator’s being apprehended and convicted. In criminal law, there is a value in finality of verdicts — of not allowing prisoners to endlessly challenge their convictions. But when DNA is available that can prove that someone is wrongly being kept behind bars, due process requires the state to allow the testing to occur. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
7:50 am	Army Charity Wrings Money From Troops Army Charity Hoards Millions Sunday 22 February 2009 by: Jeff Donn, The Associated Press Fort Bliss, Texas - As soldiers stream home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the biggest charity inside the U.S. military has been stockpiling tens of millions of dollars meant to help put returning fighters back on their feet, an Associated Press investigation shows. Between 2003 and 2007 - as many military families dealt with long war deployments and increased numbers of home foreclosures - Army Emergency Relief grew into a $345 million behemoth. During those years, the charity packed away $117 million into its own reserves while spending just $64 million on direct aid, according to an AP analysis of its tax records. Tax-exempt and legally separate from the military, AER projects a facade of independence but really operates under close Army control. The massive nonprofit - funded predominantly by troops - allows superiors to squeeze soldiers for contributions; forces struggling soldiers to repay loans - sometimes delaying transfers and promotions; and too often violates its own rules by rewarding donors, such as giving free passes from physical training, the AP found. Founded in 1942, AER eases cash emergencies of active-duty soldiers and retirees and provides college scholarships for their families. Its emergency aid covers mortgage payments and food, car repairs, medical bills, travel to family funerals, and the like. Instead of giving money away, though, the Army charity lent out 91 percent of its emergency aid during the period 2003-2007. For accounting purposes, the loans, dispensed interest-free, are counted as expenses only when they are not paid back. During that same five-year period, the smaller Navy and Air Force charities both put far more of their own resources into aid than reserves. The Air Force charity kept $24 million in reserves while dispensing $56 million in total aid, which includes grants, scholarships and loans not repaid. The Navy charity put $32 million into reserves and gave out $49 million in total aid. AER executives defend their operation, insisting they need to keep sizable reserves to be ready for future catastrophes. "Look at the stock market," said retired Col. Dennis Spiegel, AER's deputy director for administration. Without the large reserve, he added, "We'd be in very serious trouble." But smaller civilian charities for service members and veterans say they are swamped by the desperate needs of recent years, with requests far outstripping ability to respond. While independent on paper, Army Emergency Relief is housed, staffed and controlled by the U.S. Army. That's not illegal per se. Eric Smith, a spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service, said the agency can't offer an opinion on a particular charity's activities. But Marcus Owens, former head of IRS charity oversight, said charities like AER can legally partner closely with a government agency. However, he said, problems sometimes arise when their missions diverge. "There's a bit of a tension when a government organization is operating closely with a charity," he said. Most charity watchdogs view 1-to-3 years of reserves as prudent, with more than that considered hoarding. Yet the American Institute of Philanthropy says AER holds enough reserves to last about 12 years at its current level of aid. Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, said that AER collects money "very efficiently. What the shame is, is they're not doing more with it." National administrators say they've tried to loosen the purse strings. The most recent yearly figures do show a tilt by AER toward increased giving. Still, Borochoff's organization, which grades charities, gives the Army charity an "F" because of the hoarding. The AP findings include: Superior officers come calling when AER loans aren't repaid on time. Soldiers can be fined or demoted for missing loan payments. They must clear their loans before transferring or leaving the service. Promotions can be delayed or canceled if loans are not repaid. Despite strict rules against coercion, the Army uses pushy tactics to extract supposedly voluntary contributions, with superiors using language like: "How much can we count on from you?" The Army sometimes offers rewards for contributions, though incentives are banned by program rules. It sometimes excuses contributors from physical training - another clear violation. AER screens every request for aid, peering into the personal finances of its troops, essentially making the Army a soldier's boss and loan officer. "If I ask a private for something ... chances are everyone's going to do it. Why? Because I'm a lieutenant," says Iraq war veteran Tom Tarantino, otherwise an AER backer. "It can almost be construed as mandatory." Neither the Army nor Sgt. Major of the Army Kenneth Preston, an AER board member, responded to repeated requests for comment on the military's relationship with AER. AER pays just 21 staffers, all working at its headquarters at Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va. AER's other 300 or so employees at 90 Army sites worldwide are civilians paid by the Army. Also, the Army gives AER office space for free. AER's treasurer, Ret. Col. Andrew Cohen, acknowledged in an interview that "the Army runs the program in the field." Army officers dominate its corporate board too. Charities linked to other services operate along more traditional nonprofit lines. The Air Force Aid Society sprinkles its board with members from outside the military to foster broad views. The Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society pays 225 employees and, instead of relying on Navy personnel for other chores, deploys a corps of about 3,400 volunteers, including some from outside the military. Army regulations say AER "is, in effect, the U.S. Army's own emergency financial assistance organization." Under Army regulations, officers must recommend whether their soldiers deserve aid. Company commanders and first sergeants can approve up to $1,000 in loans on their own say-so. Officers also are charged with making sure their troops repay AER loans. "If you have an outstanding bill, you're warned about paying that off just to finish your tour of duty ... because it will be brought to your leadership and it will be dealt with," says Jon Nakaishi, of Tracy, Calif., an Army National Guard veteran of the Iraq war who took out a $900 AER loan to help feed his wife and children between paychecks. In his case, he was sent home with an injury and never fully repaid his loan. The Army also exercises its leverage in raising contributions from soldiers. It reaches out only to troops and veterans in annual campaigns organized by Army personnel. For those on active duty, AER organizes appeals along the chain of command. Low-ranking personnel are typically solicited by a superior who knows them personally. Spiegel, the AER administrator, said he's unaware of specific violations but added: "I spent 29 years in the Army, I know how ... first sergeants operate. Some of them do strong-arm." Army regulations ban base passes, training holidays, relief from guard duty, award plaques and "all other incentives or rewards" for contributions to AER. But the AP uncovered evidence of many violations. Before leaving active duty in 2006, Philip Aubart, who then went to Reserve Officer Training Corps at Dartmouth College, admits he gave to AER partly to be excused from push-ups, sit-ups and running the next day. For those who didn't contribute the minimum monthly allotment, the calisthenics became, in effect, a punishment. "That enticed lots and lots of guys to give," he noted. He says he gave in two annual campaigns and was allowed to skip physical training the following days. Others spoke of prizes like pizza parties and honorary flags given to top cooperating units. Make no mistake: AER, a normally uncontroversial fixture of Army life, has helped millions of soldiers and families. Last year alone, AER handed out about $5.5 million in emergency grants, $65 million in loans, and $12 million in scholarships. Despite the extra demands for soldiers busy fighting two wars, AER's management says it hasn't felt a need to boost giving in recent years. But the AP encountered considerable criticism about AER's hoarding of its treasure chest. Jack Tilley, a retired sergeant major of the Army on AER's board from 2000 to 2004, said he was surprised by AP's findings, especially during wartime. "I think they could give more. In fact, that's why that's there," said Tilley, who co-founded another charity that helps families of Mideast war veterans, the American Freedom Foundation. What does AER do with its retained wealth? Mostly, it accumulates stocks and bonds. AER ended 2007 with a $296 million portfolio; last year's tanking market cut that to $214 million, by the estimate of its treasurer. Sylvia Kidd, an AER board member in the 1990s, says she feels that the charity does much good work but guards its relief funds too jealously. "You hear things, and you think, "`They got all this money, and they should certainly be able to take care of this,'" she said. She now works for a smaller independent charity, the Association of the United States Army, providing emergency aid to some military families that AER won't help. Though AER keeps a $25 million line of bank credit to respond to a world economic crisis, its board has decided to lop off a third of its scholarship money this year. "We're not happy about it," Spiegel says. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
7:51 am	Families send love to prisoners via radio shows Families send love to prisoners via radio shows February 23, 2009 7:17 AM EST BOSTON - Every Saturday night when he was behind bars, Papo Gonzalez would sit in his dark cell, put on his headphones, turn on "Con Salsa!" and wait for his wife's words over the radio. Eventually, the radio show's host, Jose Masso, would read a message just for Gonzalez: "Saludo for Papo from Luisa, goodnight. I'm thinking of you." For many prisoners, radio shows like "Con Salsa!" are their only connection to family and friends outside prison walls. The callers - girlfriends, fathers, wives, brothers and mothers - dedicate songs, make confessions, give news, send love, even put the voices of their children on the air. "We listened, hoping for a saludo from a familiar voice," the 37-year-old Gonzalez said in Spanish. "It gave us hope and made us want to go out and get straight." Neither Masso nor Art Laboe, who DJs a similar California-based show, remember exactly when they began getting prison "shout-outs," but they say such calls are now a big part of their weekly programs. "People through their calls were making a connection to that soul by just saying the name and wanting to hear the name," Masso said. The 58-year-old began "Con Salsa!" 34 years ago on Boston University's public radio station, 90.9 WBUR-FM, while he was a high school teacher in the city. In addition to playing salsa artists, Masso used the show as a community forum. The show now runs from 10 p.m. Saturday until 3 a.m. Sunday, and can be heard in most of Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire and parts of Connecticut. Like Laboe's show, it also is streamed live online. Gonzalez's wife, 35-year-old Luisa Pena, said "Con Salsa!" allowed her to keep in touch during Gonzalez's two recent stints in prison. "It was very important because I love my husband and wanted to tell him goodnight," Pena said. "It was a struggle and it hurt." The 83-year-old Laboe, an Armenian American who's real name is Arthur Egnoian, began doing radio dedications in the 1940s and was later one of the first deejays to play R&B and rock-n-roll in California. Laboe's current show, the Sunday evening "Art Laboe Connection," is syndicated in 13 commercial stations in California, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona. He plays mainly oldies from three decades along with some recent R&B hits and gets dedication requests "at least once every minute," Laboe said. Anthony Macias, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California-Riverside, said the music that often goes with the dedications enhance the messages. For example, songs like Little Anthony & the Imperials' "I'm on the Outside (Looking In)" and War's "Don't Let No One Get You Down" speak of perseverance, while salsa songs like Ruben Blades' "Buscando America" discusses the promise of justice and equality, he said. "The music is part of the whole experience," Macias said. Both hosts get dedication requests for those serving in the U.S. armed forces who listen via live stream. Still, messages to prisoners remain a large part of the shows. "There's a strong oral tradition in Latino communities," said Mari Castaneda, a communication professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "And these shows allow people to tell the world what they are going through, that it's possible to love someone who's been placed outside of society for whatever reason." Castaneda said the shows are popular particularly with Latino listeners because the hosts don't judge and they allow callers to speak freely - sometimes asking for forgiveness for infidelity or even breaking up over the airwaves. For many families, it's the best way to get out a quick message because prisons may be far away or limit visits. In Massachusetts, for example, visitation rules vary among institutions and phone calls can be made only during certain times, said Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Correction. But prisoners are allowed to listen to the radio through headphones, she said. "Some of these guys are locked up in a place where they are not able to have visitors or even make phone calls," Laboe said. "However, they can listen to the radio." Laboe said he's even heard callers introduce prisoners to new family members. "The first time they hear their child," Laboe said, "is on my show." Masso reads all saludos over the air because he runs the show alone, while Laboe reads requests and allows callers to give dedications themselves. During a recent "Con Salsa!" show, a woman named Teresa e-mailed Masso, asking him to read a saludo to her "amor" Rafael Olivencia, who is serving time in a Concord prison. "From Teresa to Rafa," Masso read. "Remember the beach, papi. Can't wait to have that back." --- On the Net: Con Salsa!: http://www.consalsa.org Art Laboe Connections: http://www.killeroldies.com/artlaboe.htm Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 20th, 2009
6:28 am	Corrupt Judges Jail Kids for Cash Jailing Kids for Cash Tuesday 17 February 2009 by: Amy Goodman, Truthdig.com As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States. Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration: "I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word." Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible." She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times. Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella. As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud. They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children. This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails—a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out). Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration." Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust." --------- Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column. Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December. (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 7th, 2009
5:19 am	Overcoming the John Wayne Syndrome With New Stories Overcoming John Wayne Syndrome with New Stories by Barry Clemson Sojourners, 02-04-2009 Peace actions often evoke disgust, anger, and fear from the uninvolved bystander. Epithets are hurled at the demonstrators, with coward and traitor perhaps the favorites. Why should advocating peace evoke fear from the bystander? John Wayne is the classic American hero. He always came through and the bad guys got what they deserved. John Wayne’s world has three main character-types: the bad guys, the good guys, and the victims who need to be saved from the bad guys. The storyline is that evil men threaten and John Wayne swings into action, guns blazing and fists flying, and saves the day. In this world there are two possible responses when the bad guys show up: you meekly submit to the bad guys or you fight. This storyline covers everything from the crazed psycho killer threatening a lone victim all the way up to a Hitler threatening the entire world. In all these cases the plot is essentially the same: Evil threatens and your choices are the way of the coward or the way of the warrior. There are no other possibilities. This mindset is the John Wayne Syndrome. The John Wayne Syndrome has a number of attractive advantages. It is simple and it provides explicit guidance for behavior. Much of our entertainment (books, TV, and movies) reinforces this syndrome. Even the church, with the just war doctrine and cheerleading for particular wars, tends to reinforce this mindset. If our responses to evil were truly limited to the way of the coward and the way of the warrior, it is clear that the way of the warrior would be better. Even Gandhi said the way of the warrior is preferable to the way of the coward. A person operating within the John Wayne Syndrome can’t comprehend why any reasonable person would advocate nonviolence. The nonviolent person is clearly against fighting, so they must be in favor of submitting. Or perhaps they are traitors. Either way they are contemptible and a dire threat. The natural reaction is loathing, anger, and fear directed at the “peaceniks.” The question for those of us advocating nonviolence, then, is how do you deal with a mindset like the John Wayne Syndrome that denies the very possibility of nonviolence as a principled, brave, and effective strategy? Data and rational arguments work slowly if at all. Literature, TV, and movies might work. A good story seduces us and great stories often change us. Literature or a movie doesn’t need to make a frontal attack on the syndrome; it can gently subvert it. My own approach was to write a novel that begins with the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940. In this novel the Danes prepared a campaign of total resistance using strategic nonviolence. The main theme of the novel is a deadly chess game between the brutal Nazis and the stubborn Danes. The point of doing such a novel is to educate our imaginations on the possibilities for nonviolence. This sort of novel, if it is done well, should replace the John Wayne Syndrome, and the reader should finish the novel and say to themselves something like, “Wow! I didn’t know you could do that. Those nonviolent folks were pretty rough – and it worked.” If we could get a Steven Spielberg to make movies like this and someone equally gifted to do a TV series along these lines – well, it should become much more difficult to stampede us into a war. The nonviolent stories are out there, and the people of the world have been living them; all we have to do is write them up and get them into the public’s imagination. Barry Clemson can be reached at barryclemson@verizon.net. His web page is www.cyberneticapress.com. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
6:21 am	Death in Custody-Juvenile Rikers Horror Story New York City corrections officials have done a commendable job reducing the number of beatings, stabbings and other violent acts that have long plagued city jails. We are very concerned about recent events — including the death of an inmate — at the troubled youth facility at the Rikers Island jail. Clearly, the city needs to do a much better job of training and supervising corrections officers there. Juvenile justice advocates and former inmates had been complaining about misconduct by the guards long before Christopher Robinson, 18, was found beaten to death in his cell last fall. They accused the guards of turning disciplinary responsibility over to roving gangs that beat, harassed and extorted money and valuables from other inmates. Some critics referred to the facility as a “gladiator school” where young people were encouraged to fight and damage one another. The Bronx district attorney has now charged three corrections officers with conspiracy in connection with Mr. Robinson’s death. This is the second indictment of its kind at the youth facility in less than a year. According to the new indictment, guards used violent inmates to ride herd over others, sanctioned assaults on inmates and decided when, where and how they would take place. Prosecutors accused the guards of setting up a system of warning signals to protect gang members from being discovered when they administered beatings. They said the guards directed their “teams” to avoid hitting inmates in the face so that any injuries would not be readily apparent. City corrections officials believe they can discourage misconduct by expanding the use of surveillance cameras. The indictments suggest the entire culture of the Rikers youth facility needs to be changed. That’s the only way to ensure these horrors are never repeated. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Compa (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
4:58 am	The Torture of Prison Medical Abuse Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions By NINA BERNSTEIN New York Times, Jan. 28, 2009 He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection. His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell. Mr. Newbrough, a construction worker who had served jail time for molesting a girlfriend’s young daughter, was found unresponsive in the cell several days later, on Nov. 27, and died at a hospital the next day without regaining consciousness. An autopsy report last week cited a virulent staph infection as an underlying cause of his death from endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves that is typically cured with antibiotics. Accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s last days echo other cases of deaths in immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so lacking that they concluded, “Detainee health care is in jeopardy.” But Immigration and Customs Enforcement never released those findings, even when asked about allegations of neglect in that death, of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born mechanic with no criminal record whose kidneys failed over several weeks. Instead, officials defended care in that case and other deaths as Congress and the news media questioned medical practices in the patchwork of county jails, private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold noncitizens while the government tries to deport them. The 2006 report — and a set of talking points the agency produced for its press officers to use when discussing deaths in detention — were only recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act; the group provided copies to The New York Times, which first reported Mr. Sall’s death. “This facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervision and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees,” the six-page report concluded shortly after he died. “The medical health care unit does not meet minimum ICE standards.” The report said the jail had failed to respond adequately as Mr. Sall grew sicker, and that even when he was found unconscious on the floor, employees “stood around for approximately one minute” before trying to revive him. The jail’s superintendent, who said he never saw the report, adamantly denied those conclusions this week. But Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the civil liberties union’s National Prison Project, said the new death at the same jail underscored the lack of accountability in immigration detention nationwide. “Piedmont is a facility that was understaffed and underresponsive to clear medical needs,” Mr. Jawetz said. “The reports of Mr. Newbrough’s death raise serious questions about whether those failures were ever remedied.” Asked Monday what measures it had taken after Mr. Sall’s death, the immigration agency promised a response but did not provide one. Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman, said earlier that an investigation of Mr. Newbrough’s death was under way. The 780-bed Piedmont jail, run by governments of six Virginia counties, typically houses about 300 immigration detainees, and is now down to fewer than 150. But Ms. Nantel denied rumors that the agency was pulling them out, as it did last month at a detention center in Central Falls, R.I., where a Chinese computer engineer’s extensive cancer and fractured spine went undiagnosed until shortly before his death on Aug. 6. In that case, investigators for the federal immigration agency found that the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, had been denied proper medical treatment, and dragged from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain six days before his death. The parallels with detainee accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s treatment are striking to Jeff Winder, an organizer for the grass-roots Virginia group People United, who was contacted by several inmates at Piedmont who also spoke to a reporter. The latest death has heightened the group’s opposition to plans by private developers and city officials to build another immigration detention center in Farmville, with 1,000 to 2,500 beds. “ICE has no obligation to send detainees there after the next detainee dies,” Mr. Winder said. “Farmville could be left with the reputation as a place where detainees die of medical neglect.” Ernest L. Toney, the jail superintendent, denied accounts that Mr. Newbrough had been mistreated, saying, “That is not our protocol here.” He referred all other questions about his death to the federal immigration agency. But Dr. Homer D. Venters, an expert in detention health care who learned about the case from Mr. Newbrough’s family and reviewed the autopsy, said available evidence showed violations of detention standards that let the detainee’s treatable local infections rage out of control. Dr. Venters, a public health fellow at New York University, was critical of the medical care in immigration detention when he testified last year at a Congressional subcommittee hearing, and is on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement advisory group. “First, Mr. Newbrough’s medical complaints were apparently ignored,” he wrote in a preliminary analysis of the case for Mr. Newbrough’s parents. “Second, Mr. Newbrough was placed in a disciplinary setting while ill and despite having voiced medical complaints. Third, Mr. Newbrough was not adequately (if at all) medically monitored” in the isolation cell. During those last days, Dr. Venters added in an interview, even guards should have noticed that Mr. Newbrough was in critical condition as the bacteria colonizing his heart broke loose, creating abscesses in his brain, liver and kidneys. “When endocarditis is not treated, it kills people,” he said. With modern hospital care, the death rate is 25 percent or less. “We were sitting here, powerless,” said Mr. Newbrough’s stepfather, Jack Newbrough, 70, a former Air Force sergeant who met Guido’s mother, Heidi, and Guido, then 2, when he was stationed in their native Germany. “I am just so disappointed in my country, this homeland security system they got set up.” Mrs. Newbrough, 65, said her son, who had an estranged wife and three American-born children, had quit drinking after serving 11 months for molestation and, on probation, moved back to his childhood home in Manassas, Va., from a trailer park in Stafford. A 1999 article about life in the park, in the first issue of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, featured him prominently — under the rubric “Dialing America.” “Nobody knew he wasn’t American,” his mother said. “Even he didn’t know. He found out the day they picked him up here.” His arrest last February, immigration records show, was a result of Operation Coldplay, which combs probation records to find past sex offenders whose immigration status makes them deportable. Mr. Newbrough had taken what is known as an Alford plea to charges of “indecent liberties with a minor,” and aggravated sexual battery in 2002 — denying his guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors had evidence that could cause a jury to convict him of molesting his girlfriend’s 4-year-old. Mr. Newbrough, who spoke no German, would have automatically become a citizen if his American-born stepfather had formally adopted him when he was a child, or if his mother had been naturalized while he was a minor, rather than just four years ago. While Mr. Newbrough waited at Piedmont for nine months, an immigration lawyer argued that he had derived citizenship from his stepfather. An immigration judge disagreed. The appeal was pending in mid-November when Mr. Newbrough began to complain in phone calls of terrible back pain and stomach aches, his family said. When they urged him to tell the medical staff, they said, he replied: “ ‘I did. They just don’t care.’ ” Several detainees interviewed by telephone last week said that in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mr. Newbrough’s back pain grew so bad that he began sobbing through the night, and some in the 90-man unit took turns making him hot compresses. By the Sunday before Thanksgiving, he was desperate, two detainees said, and banged at the door of the unit’s lunchroom, yelling for help. They said by the time guards responded, he was seated at a table. “They told him to get up, and he said he couldn’t get up because he was in a lot of pain,” said Salvador Alberto Rivas, who identified himself as Mr. Newbrough’s bunk mate, awaiting deportation to El Salvador. “Because of the pain, he started crying, and he was trying to tell them he had put in requests for medical and didn’t get any. And then one of the guards threw him to the floor.” “They drag him by his leg, in front of about 30 people,” said another detainee, who gave his name only as Jose for fear of retaliation, adding that many witnesses had since been transferred to other jails or deported. “We didn’t know that he was dying,” added Jose, who wrote about the case in a letter published online by a Spanish weekly. “They took him to the hole. He was yelling for help in the hole, too.” That information, he said, came from a detainee in the isolation section at the same time, but since deported, who was so upset by Mr. Newbrough’s death that he left his name and alien registration number — Rene Cordoba Palma, No. 088424581 — in case anyone wanted his testimony. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
7:43 am	The Mother of All Problems: Palestine How Words Could End a War By SCOTT ATRAN and JEREMY GINGES New York Times, Sunday January 25 AS diplomats stitch together a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Rational calculation suggests that neither side can win these wars. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence; yet still both sides opt to fight. This small territory is the world’s great symbolic knot. “Palestine is the mother of all problems” is a common refrain among people we have interviewed across the Muslim world: from Middle Eastern leaders to fighters in the remote island jungles of Indonesia; from Islamist senators in Pakistan to volunteers for martyrdom on the move from Morocco to Iraq. Some analysts see this as a testament to the essentially religious nature of the conflict. But research we recently undertook suggests a way to go beyond that. For there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes. These conflicts cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on their own terms, a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik. Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs. In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace. All those surveyed responded to the same set of deals. First they would be given a straight-up offer in which each side would make difficult concessions in exchange for peace; next they were given a scenario in which their side was granted an additional material incentive; and last came a proposal in which the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values. For example, a typical set of trade-offs offered to a Palestinian might begin with this premise: Suppose the United Nations organized a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians under which Palestinians would be required to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel and there would be two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Second, we would sweeten the pot: in return, Western nations would give the Palestinian state $10 billion a year for 100 years. Then the symbolic concession: For its part, Israel would officially apologize for the displacement of civilians in the 1948 war Indeed, across the political spectrum, almost everyone we surveyed rejected the initial solutions we offered — ideas that are accepted as common sense among most Westerners, like simply trading land for peace or accepting shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Why the opposition to trade-offs for peace? Many of the respondents insisted that the values involved were sacred to them. For example, nearly half the Israeli settlers we surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank — territory they believe was granted them by God — in exchange for peace. More than half the Palestinians considered full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-fifths felt that the “right of return” was a sacred value, too. As for sweetening the pot, in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to sell their children. This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire. Many Westerners seem to ignore these clearly expressed “irrational” preferences, because in a sensible world they ought not to exist. Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War — progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of “who we are and want to be.” Fortunately, our work also offers hints of another, more optimistic course. Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist. Remarkably, our survey results were mirrored by our discussions with political leaders from both sides. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook (the deputy chairman of Hamas) said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: “No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount.” But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he brightened: “Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues, rather than the reverse. We got a similar reaction from Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former Israeli prime minister. We asked him whether he would seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region. He answered, “O.K., but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations.” Making these sorts of wholly intangible “symbolic” concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is the author of the forthcoming “Talking to the Enemy.” Jeremy Ginges is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
5:24 am	Zimbabwe is Dying Zimbabwe Is Dying By BOB HERBERT New York Times If you want to see hell on earth, go to Zimbabwe where the madman Robert Mugabe has brought the country to such a state of ruin that medical care for most of the inhabitants has all but ceased to exist. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now the lowest in the world: 37 years for men and 34 for women. A cholera epidemic is raging. People have become ill with anthrax after eating the decaying flesh of animals that had died from the disease. Power was lost to the morgue in the capital city of Harare, leaving the corpses to rot. Most of the world is ignoring the agony of Zimbabwe, a once prosperous and medically advanced nation in southern Africa that is suffering from political and economic turmoil — and the brutality of Mugabe’s long and tyrannical reign. The decline in health services over the past year has been staggering. An international team of doctors that conducted an “emergency assessment” of the state of medical care last month seemed stunned by the catastrophe they witnessed. The team was sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights. In their report, released this week, the doctors said: “The collapse of Zimbabwe’s health system in 2008 is unprecedented in scale and scope. Public-sector hospitals have been shuttered since November 2008. The basic infrastructure for the maintenance of public health, particularly water and sanitation services, have abruptly deteriorated in the worsening political and economic climate.” Doctors and nurses are trying to do what they can under the most harrowing of circumstances: facilities with no water, no functioning toilets and barely any medicine or supplies. The report quoted the director of a mission hospital: “A major problem is the loss of life and fetal wastage we are seeing with obstetric patients. They come so late, the fetuses are already dead. We see women with eclampsia who have been seizing for 12 hours. There is no intensive care unit here, and now there is no intensive care in Harare. “If we had intensive care, we know it would be immediately full of critically ill patients. As it is, they just die.” Mugabe’s corrupt, violent and profoundly destructive reign has left Zim-babwe in shambles. It’s a nation overwhelmed by poverty, the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic and hyperinflation. Once considered the “breadbasket” of Africa, Zimbabwe is now a country that cannot feed its own people. The unemployment rate is higher than 80 percent. Malnutrition is widespread, as is fear. A nurse told the Physicians for Human Rights team: “We are not supposed to have hunger in Zimbabwe. So even though we do see it, we cannot report it.” Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement a few months ago with a political opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, who out-polled Mugabe in an election last March but did not win a majority of the votes. But continuing turmoil, including violent attacks by Mugabe’s supporters and allegations that Mugabe forces have engaged in torture, have prevented the agreement from taking effect. The widespread skepticism that greeted Mugabe’s alleged willingness to share power only increased when he ranted, just last month: “I will never, never, never surrender ... Zimbabwe is mine.” Meanwhile, health care in Zimbabwe has fallen into the abyss. “This emergency is so grave that some entity needs to step in there and take over the health delivery system,” said Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights. In November, the primary public referral hospital in Harare, Parirenyatwa Hospital, shut down. Its medical school closed with it. The nightmare that forced the closings was spelled out in the report: “The hospital had no running water since August of 2008. Toilets were overflowing, and patients and staff had nowhere to void — soon making the hospital uninhabitable. Parirenyatwa Hospital was closed four months into the cholera epidemic, arguably the worst of all possible times to have shut down public hospital access. Successful cholera care, treatment and control are impossible, however, in a facility without clean water and functioning toilets.” The hospital’s surgical wards were closed in September. A doctor described the heartbreaking dilemma of having children in his care who he knew would die without surgery. “I have no pain medication,” he said, “some antibiotics, but no nurses ... If I don’t operate, the patient will die. But if I do the surgery, the child will die also.” What’s documented in the Physicians for Human Rights report is evidence of a shocking medical and human rights disaster that warrants a much wider public spotlight, and an intensified effort to mount an international humanitarian intervention. Some organizations are already on the case, including Doctors Without Borders and Unicef. But Zimbabwe is dying, and much more is needed. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
6:17 am	Book Review: Hitler's Library The Reader By JACOB HEILBRUNN New York Times, Jan. 3, 2009 HITLER’S PRIVATE LIBRARY The Books That Shaped His Life By Timothy W. Ryback Illustrated. 278 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95 In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers’ comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin’s cultural treasures. Referred to as “the artist” by his fellow message runners, he was something of a figure of amusement to them, partly because it was easy to get a rise out of him by declaring that the war was lost, and partly because he spent hours in the trenches hunched over news papers and books during lulls in his duties. This withdrawn infantryman had denounced the Christmas Truce of December 1914, when British and German soldiers fraternized for a day. The only living being he reserved his affection for was a white terrier that strayed across enemy lines and obeyed him unconditionally. Nor did his habits ever really change. Decades later he would abandon his companions late in the evening to retire to the solitude of his study, where reading glasses, a book and a steaming pot of tea awaited him. When his girlfriend was once so indelicate as to intrude upon his reveries, she met with a tirade that sent her running red-faced down the hallway. A sign hanging outside, after all, adjured “Absolute Silence!” By the end of his life, when he had been abandoned by most of his retinue and staged his own Götterdämmerung, the only personal effects the invading Soviet soldiers found in his Berlin bunker were several dozen books. Adolf Hitler may be better known to posterity for burning rather than cherishing books, but as Timothy W. Ryback observes in “Hitler’s Private Library,” he owned more than 16,000 volumes at his residences in Berlin and Munich, and at his alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg. Ryback, the author of “The Last Survivor,” a study of the town of Dachau, has immersed himself in the remnants of Hitler’s collection, which are mostly housed at the Library of Congress. In poring over Hitler’s markings and marginalia, Ryback seeks to reconstruct the steps by which he created his mental map of the world. The result is a remarkably absorbing if not wholly persuasive book. Hitler may never have completed any formal education, but as his friend from his early days in Vienna, August Kubizek, recalled, books “were his world.” As Ryback shows, in the early 1920s, Hitler not only plowed through hundreds of historical and racist books to shore up his ideological bona fides as the leader of the fledgling Nazi Party, but also went to great lengths to construct a canon for it. He furnished a list of recommended readings stamped on party membership cards that stated in boldface, “Books that every National Socialist must know” (weakly translated by Ryback as “should read”). It included such gems as Henry Ford’s “International Jew” and Alfred Rosenberg’s “Zionism as an Enemy of the State.” Confirmation of Hitler’s bibliophilic inclinations also appears in the form of a rare photograph of his small apartment in Munich showing “Hitler posed in a dark suit before one of his two bookcases” — a handsome piece of furniture with scalloped molding — “his arms crossed in an assertively proprietary gesture.” After Hitler’s failed 1923 beer hall putsch in Munich, a sympathetic court sentenced him to the minimum five years for high treason, with likely early clemency, a slap on the wrist administered, fittingly enough, on April Fools’ Day. At Landsberg prison, where he was cosseted by his jailers, Hitler wrote his first book, “Mein Kampf.” According to Ryback, “the one book among Hitler’s extant prison readings that left a noticeable intellectual footprint in ‘Mein Kampf’ is a well-thumbed copy of ‘Racial Typology of the German People,’ by Hans F. K. Günther, known as ‘Racial Günther’ for his fanatical views on racial purity.” Though Ryback does not mention it, Hitler also received weekly tutorials in Landsberg from Karl Haushofer, a University of Munich professor of politics and a proponent of Lebensraum. Ryback singles out the Munich publisher Julius Friedrich Lehmann as possessing “the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudo science of biological racism.” Ryback continues, “With this cache of Lehmann books we are in possession of a core collection within the Hitler library and the primary building blocks not only for Hitler’s intellectual world but for the ideological foundations of his Third Reich.” But are we? Hitler was tapped in 1919 by Capt. Karl Mayr to attend propaganda sessions at the University of Munich and to lecture to soldiers about the Bolshevik peril. As early as September of that year, in response to a soldier’s written inquiry about the “Jewish Question,” Hitler declared that rational anti-Semitism’s “final aim must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether.” As the historian Ian Kershaw has observed in his biography of Hitler, this response indicates that he adhered unswervingly, from the end of World War I until his final days in the Berlin bunker, to nationalism and radical anti-Semitism. In short, Hitler’s brooding over texts seems far more likely to have confirmed rather than created his virulent hatreds. What’s more, Ryback overlooks the importance of the city where Hitler first imbibed anti-Semitism. Hitler’s Vienna, to borrow the title of a book by the Austrian scholar Brigitte Hamann, was a cauldron of Jew hatred. Hitler admired the city’s anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger and steeped himself in racist newspapers and pamphlets. He also fell under the spell of German Romanticism, in the form of Wagner’s operas, which nourished the illusion that he was a new Rienzi, with a mission to resurrect the old German Reich. For Ryback, the essence of Hitler is “a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.” But there was more to it than that. While Hitler had no original thoughts, he wasn’t a primitive carnival barker. On the contrary, he championed notions that had percolated in Wilhelmine Germany and had been steadily gaining credence in intellectual and bourgeois circles. Hitler’s genius was to fuse German cultural nationalism with politics, allowing him to exert an aesthetic fascination on his contemporaries. As Thomas Mann unflinchingly and keenly recorded in his 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” the Führer might have been “unpleasant and shameful,” but he was not someone whose kinship Mann could simply wish away. Still, Ryback has provided a tantalizing glimpse into Hitler’s creepy little self- improvement program. While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment. Stalin, too, was an avid reader, boasting a library of 20,000 volumes. “If you want to know the people around you,” Stalin said, “find out what they read.” When Ryback began exploring Hitler’s collection, he discovered that a copy of the writings of the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz was nestled beside a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed to “Monsieur Hitler végétarien.” Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest. His book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons,” has just come out in paperback. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Friday, January 2nd, 2009
6:50 am	James Madison on War Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honours, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. . . [There is also] an inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and. . . degeneracy of manners and of morals. . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. . . The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war. . . the power of raising armies. . . the power of creating offices. . . A delegation of such powers [to the President] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted. The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them, is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them. The separation of the power of creating offices from that of filling them, is an essential guard against the temptation to create offices for the sake of gratifying favourites or multiplying dependents." -- James Madison, 4th President of the US from "Political Observations", April 20, 1795, in Madison, James.1865. Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Published by order of Congress. 4 volumes; Edited by Philip R. Fendall. Philadelphia Lippincott, Volume IV, page 491 http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=3269 (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
6:59 am	Sen. Webb Spearheads Prison Reform Initiative Sen. Webb’s Call for Prison Reform-New York Times This country puts too many people behind bars for too long. Most elected officials, afraid of being tarred as soft on crime, ignore these problems. Sen. Jim Webb, a Democrat of Virginia, is now courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy. Other members of Congress should show the same courage and rally to the cause. The United States has the world’s highest reported incarceration rate. Although it has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has almost one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. And for the first time in history, more than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. Many inmates are serving long sentences for nonviolent crimes, including minor drug offenses. It also is extraordinarily expensive. Billions of dollars now being spent on prisons each year could be used in far more socially productive ways. Senator Webb — a former Marine and secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration — is in many ways an unlikely person to champion criminal justice reform. But his background makes him an especially effective advocate for a cause that has often been associated with liberals and academics. In his two years in the Senate, Mr. Webb has held hearings on the cost of mass incarceration and on the criminal justice system’s response to the problems of illegal drugs. He also has called attention to the challenges of prisoner re-entry and of the need to provide released inmates, who have paid their debts to society, more help getting jobs and resuming productive lives. Mr. Webb says he intends to introduce legislation to create a national commission to investigate these issues. With Barack Obama in the White House, and strong Democratic majorities in Congress, the political climate should be more favorable than it has been in years. And the economic downturn should make both federal and state lawmakers receptive to the idea of reforming a prison system that is as wasteful as it is inhumane. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
5:32 am	Faith, Health and Future For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It By JOHN TIERNEY-New York Times If I’m serious about keeping my New Year’s resolutions in 2009, should I add another one? Should the to-do list include, “Start going to church”? This is an awkward question for a heathen to contemplate, but I felt obliged to raise it with Michael McCullough after reading his report in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin. He and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control. This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school, but Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives. He confesses to not being much of a devotee himself. “When it comes to religion,” he said, “professionally, I’m a fan, but personally, I don’t get down on the field much.” His professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier. These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength. “We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.” As early as the 1920s, researchers found that students who spent more time in Sunday school did better at laboratory tests measuring their self-discipline. Subsequent studies showed that religiously devout children were rated relatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers, and that religiosity repeatedly correlated with higher self-control among adults. Devout people were found to be more likely than others to wear seat belts, go to the dentist and take vitamins. But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence. “Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.” In a study published by the University of Maryland in 2003, students who were subliminally exposed to religious words (like God, prayer or bible) were slower to recognize words associated with temptations (like drugs or premarital sex). Conversely, when they were primed with the temptation words, they were quicker to recognize the religious words. “It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,” Dr. McCullough said. “When temptations cross their minds in daily life, they quickly use religion to dispel them from their minds.” In one personality study, strongly religious people were compared with people who subscribed to more general spiritual notions, like the idea that their lives were “directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being” or that they felt “a spiritual connection to other people.” The religious people scored relatively high in conscientiousness and self-control, whereas the spiritual people tended to score relatively low. “Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,” Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.” Does this mean that nonbelievers like me should start going to church? Even if you don’t believe in a supernatural god, you could try improving your self-control by at least going along with the rituals of organized religion. But that probably wouldn’t work either, Dr. McCullough told me, because personality studies have identified a difference between true believers and others who attend services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress people or make social connections. The intrinsically religious people have higher self-control, but the extrinsically religious do not. So what’s a heathen to do in 2009? Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals. Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy. “People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.” Of course, it requires some self-control to carry out that exercise — and maybe more effort than it takes to go to church. “Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2008
8:56 am	Falsely Convicted, Falsely Imprisoned Man Sues DA and Wins 14 Mil. DA owes man for 14 years Posted by jdeberry <http://blog.nola.com/jarvisdeberry/about.html> December 28, 2008 01:00AM The week before an appellate court upheld a ruling that awarded $14 million to a New Orleans man who had been railroaded onto death row, District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro was telling a group at The Times-Picayune why he didn't think his office should have to pay the man anything. The now-deceased assistant district attorney who withheld evidence that might have kept John Thompson from being convicted and sentenced to death was essentially a solo operator, Cannizzaro averred. Therefore, he said, the district attorney's office should not be expected to pay the costs for that rogue prosecutor's despicable act. It would have been better for Cannizzaro to say, "Look, we just can't pay the bill," than to suggest that a government agency shouldn't be held responsible for the misdeeds of one of its agents acting in his official capacity. The district attorney's office has tremendous power, up to and including the power to put a defendant on the path to death row. Prosecutor Gerry Deegan had no power over John Thompson except the power that came from his position in the district attorney's office. That's why it was strange to hear Cannizzaro speak of the deceased Deegan as if he were a mere individual. Prosecutors first won an armed robbery conviction against Thompson so that they could easily impeach his testimony if he took the stand during his subsequent murder trial. But Deegan had withheld evidence that would have cleared Thompson of an armed robbery charge, which means he had finagled an unfair advantage for the state during Thompson's first-degree murder trial. The strategy worked. Knowing prosecutors would use the ill-gotten armed robbery conviction against him, Thompson stayed silent during his murder trial and was convicted and sentenced to death. After 14 years on death row, Thompson's armed robbery conviction was thrown out. In the murder retrial, he took the stand in his own defense and was acquitted in 35 minutes. He filed suit against the district attorney's office in 2003 and a federal jury determined that the office "was deliberately indifferent to the need to train, monitor and supervise its attorneys" on the mandate to turn over exculpatory evidence. Jurors awarded Thompson $14 million, a million dollars for each year he spent on death row. Cannizzaro had not yet been elected when Thompson sued the district attorney's office. Eddie Jordan was the district attorney, and he and his predecessor Harry Connick were both named as defendants. But Cannizzaro's argument that his office shouldn't be held liable fits nicely with his predecessors' argument that Thompson's 14-year stay on death row wasn't that bad. In trying to get Thompson's $14 million reward overturned, lawyers representing the district attorney's office pointed out that he had never been raped, was fed at all times and given necessary medicine, received visitors, became buddies with other inmates, got to watch television and play chess. Plus, they added, he had been in jail for little stuff before and describes himself now as being "blessed." In turning down the district attorney office's appeal, the justices chided those making that argument for their "misleadingly rosy picture of Thompson's life both in prison and after his release." Maybe it's in the nature of every prosecutor to make crazy arguments to avoid compensating a railroaded defendant. There must be all the more motivation to make such arguments when the office is already strapped for money. No matter. John Thompson suffered at the hands of the district attorney's office. And, unless one is a district attorney, it's impossible to come up with a reason why the district attorney's office shouldn't be expected to pay. /Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at 504.826.3355 or at jdeberry@timespicayune.com. / (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 22nd, 2008
4:57 am	Make Mischief Against the Darkness Hard Times, a Helping Hand By TED GUP Canton, Ohio IN the weeks just before Christmas of 1933 — 75 years ago — a mysterious offer appeared in The Repository, the daily newspaper here. It was addressed to all who were suffering in that other winter of discontent known as the Great Depression. The bleakest of holiday seasons was upon them, and the offer promised modest relief to those willing to write in and speak of their struggles. In return, the donor, a “Mr. B. Virdot,” pledged to provide a check to the neediest to tide them over the holidays. Not surprisingly, hundreds of letters for Mr. B. Virdot poured into general delivery in Canton — even though there was no person of that name in the city of 105,000. A week later, checks, most for as little as $5, started to arrive at homes around Canton. They were signed by “B. Virdot.” The gift made The Repository’s front page on Dec. 18, 1933. The headline read: “Man Who Felt Depression’s Sting to Help 75 Unfortunate Families: Anonymous Giver, Known Only as ‘B. Virdot,’ Posts $750 to Spread Christmas Cheer.” The story said the faceless donor was “a Canton man who was toppled from a large fortune to practically nothing” but who had returned to prosperity and now wanted to give a Christmas present to “75 deserving fellow townsmen.” The gifts were to go to men and women who might otherwise “hesitate to knock at charity’s door for aid.” Whether the paper spoke to Mr. B. Virdot directly or through an intermediary or whether it received something in writing from him is not known. Down through the decades, the identity of the benefactor remained a mystery. Three prosperous generations later, the whole affair was consigned to a footnote in Canton’s history. But to me, the story had always served as an example of how selfless Americans reach out to one another in hard times. I can’t even remember the first time I heard about Mr. B. Virdot, but I knew the tale well. Then, this past summer, my mother handed me a battered old black suitcase that had been gathering dust in her attic. I flipped open the twin latches and found a mass of letters, all dated December 1933. There were also 150 canceled checks signed by “B. Virdot,” and a tiny black bank book with $760 in deposits. My mother, Virginia, had always known the secret: the donor was her father, Samuel J. Stone. The fictitious moniker was a blend of his daughters’ names — Barbara, Virginia and Dorothy. But Mother had never told me, and when she handed me the suitcase she had no idea what was in it — “some old papers,” she said. The suitcase had passed into her possession shortly after the death of my grandmother Minna in 2005. I took the suitcase with me to our log cabin in the woods of Maine, and there, one night, began to read letter after letter. They had come from all over Canton, from out-of-work upholsterers, painters, bricklayers, day laborers, insurance salesmen and, yes, former executives — some of whom, I later learned, my grandfather had known personally. One, written Dec. 19, 1933, begins, “I hate to write this letter ... it seems too much like begging. Anyway, here goes. I will be honest, my husband doesn’t know I’m writing this letter... . He is working but not making enough to hardly feed his family. We are going to do everything in our power to hold on to our house.” Three years behind in taxes and out of credit at the grocery store, the writer closed with, “Even if you don’t think we’re worthy of help, I hope you receive a great blessing for your kindness.” Another letter came from a 38-year-old steel worker, out of a job and stricken with tuberculosis, who wrote of his inability to pay the hospital bills for his son, whose skull had been fractured after he was struck by a car. One man wrote: “For one like me who for a lifetime has earned a fine living, charity by force of distressed circumstances is an abomination and a headache. However, your offer carries with it a spirit so far removed from those who offer help for their own glorification, you remove so much of the sting and pain of forced charity that I venture to tell you my story.” The writer, once a prominent businessman, was now 65 and destitute, his life insurance policy cashed in and gone, his furniture “mortgaged,” his clothes threadbare, his hope of paying the electric and gas bills pinned to the intervention of his children. A mother of four wrote, “My husband hasn’t had steady work in four years ... . The people who are lucky enough to have no worry where the next meal is coming from don’t realize how it is to be like we are and a lot of others... . I only wish I could do what you are doing.” Another letter was from the wife of an out-of-work bricklayer. “Mr. Virdot, we are in desperate circumstances,” she wrote. They had taken in her husband’s mother and father and a 10-year-old boy. Now the landlord had given them three days to pay up. “It is awful,” she wrote. “No one knows, only those who go through it. It does seem so much like begging. ” Children, too, wrote in. The youngest was 12-year-old Mary Uebing. “There are six in our family,” she wrote, “and my father is dead ... my baby sister is sick. Last Christmas our dinner was slim and this Christmas it will be slimmer... . Any way you could help us would be appreciated in this fatherless and worrisome home.” The wife of an out-of-work insurance salesman added a postscript to her letter, one not intended for her husband’s eyes: She had just pawned her engagement ring for $5. Also in the suitcase were thank-you letters from people who had received Mr. Virdot’s checks. A father wrote: “It was put to good use paying for two pairs of shoes for my girls and other little necessities. I hope some day I have the pleasure of knowing to whom we are indebted for this very generous gift.” That was from George W. Monnot, who had once owned a successful Ford dealership but whose reluctance to lay off his salesmen hastened his own financial collapse, his granddaughter told me. Of course, the checks could not reverse the fortunes of an entire family, much less a community. A few months after one man, Roy Teis, wrote to B. Virdot, his family splintered apart. His eight children, including a 4-year-old daughter, were scattered among nearly as many foster homes, and there they remained for years to come. So why had my grandfather done this? Because he had known what it was to be down and out. In 1902, when he was 15, he and his family had fled Romania, where they had been persecuted and stripped of the right to work because they were Jews. They settled into an immigrant ghetto in Pittsburgh. His father forced him to roll cigars with his six other siblings in the attic, hiding his shoes so he could not go to school. My grandfather later worked on a barge and in a coal mine, swabbed out dirty soda bottles until the acid ate at his fingers and was even duped into being a strike breaker, an episode that left him bloodied by nightsticks. He had been robbed at night and swindled in daylight. Midlife, he had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, almost losing his clothing store and his home. By the time the Depression hit, he had worked his way out of poverty, owning a small chain of clothing stores and living in comfort. But his good fortune carried with it a weight when so many around him had so little. His yuletide gift was not to be his only such gesture. In the same black suitcase were receipts hinting at other anonymous acts of kindness. The year before the United States entered World War II, for instance, he sent hundreds of wool overcoats to British soldiers. In the pocket of each was a handwritten note, unsigned, urging them not to give in to despair and expressing America’s support. Like many in his generation, my grandfather believed in hard work, and disdained handouts. In 1981, at age 93, he died driving himself to the office, crashing while trying to beat a rising drawbridge. But he could never ignore the brutal reality of times when work was simply not to be had and self-reliance reached its limits. He sought no credit for acts of conscience. He saw them as the debt we owe one another and ourselves. For many Americans, this Christmas will be grim. Here, in Ohio, food banks and shelters are trying to cope with the fallout from plant closings, layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The family across the street lost their home. From our breakfast table, we look out on their house, dark and vacant. Multibillion-dollar bailouts to banks and Wall Street have yet to bring relief to those humbled by need and overwhelmed by debt. Already, the B. Virdot in me — in each of us — can hear the words of our neighbors. Ted Gup, a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of “Nation of Secrets.” (1 Comment |Comment on this)