According to the New York Times, newly sworn-in Governor Andrew Cuomo is already scaling back his plans to close several New York prisons.

Cuomo came into office talking tough about closing prisons in his state:

In his Jan. 5 address to the Legislature, Mr. Cuomo said that “an incarceration program is not an employment program.”

“If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs,” he added. “Don’t put other people in prison to give some people jobs. Don’t put other people in juvenile justice facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about, and that has to end this session.”

On Friday, his administration had little to say publicly on the matter.

What happened you might ask… Well once again, let’s turn to the New York Times:

Republicans have certainly made their feelings clear about any potential closings.

“We recognize that this is going to be a tough budget with real cuts, and we just hope that these cuts are equally distributed around the state,” said Senator Thomas W. Libous, a Binghamton Republican and the deputy majority leader.

“I do think the governor understands the prison issue,” he added. “I know he understands the prison issue is always a sensitive one to upstate.”

Why is closing prisons a “sensitive” issue in Upstate New York?

Senator Betty Little, a Republican whose district includes much of the Adirondacks, said the economic effects had to be considered. “The area I represent is northern New York, it’s very rural, and we built an economy around these facilities, first of all because no one else wanted them in their neighborhoods and because the land was cheap,” she said. “Hopefully when they look at closure, they look at economic impact. I’m not trying to create inmates to keep these places open, but we need to look at the whole picture.”

I guess that Governor Cuomo was wrong… Prisons ARE in fact employment programs…

Again I can’t vouch for how good these documentaries will be but here is the information nonetheless. On Tuesday, National Geographic will premiere a documentary series called Hard Time. A couple of weeks later two documentaries about women in prison (as prisoners and workers) will premiere too.

Prison Women: Females on Guard
Sunday, February 13 at 8PM ET/PT

More women than ever are working as guards in Miami’s roughest prisons, putting their lives in danger guarding south Florida’s most dangerous criminals. However, taking the job means walking into a world ruled by power, sex and violence. Our cameras step inside the 50-year-old Pretrial Detention Center, where female guards confront daily brawls and outbursts. We’ll meet a recent graduate from the training academy as she begins working at the facility, a veteran officer trying to curb sexual harassment by inmates against female officers and a young officer scrambling to secure her floor after an inmate was stabbed.

HARD TIME: Female Offenders
Tuesday, February 15 at 10PM ET/PT

Women are the fastest-growing prison population in America, and among the toughest to manage. At the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) outside of Columbus, “pseudo-families” emerge instead of gangs. Inmate Dorie Terrell heads a family 30 members strong. She claims to offer guidance and food to her girls, but the prison sees her role as a potentially dangerous abuse of power. When Heather O’Brien arrived at ORW, she was almost nine months pregnant. See the many challenges she faces while raising her daughter in the prison nursery.

According to a recent study titled Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration:

African American children are seven and Latino children two and half times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. The estimated risk of parental imprisonment for white children by the age of 14 is one in 25, while for black children it is one in four by the same age.

The magnitude of this crisis often feels impossible to convey to the general public. Yet in order to create a successful mass movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex, we must engage thousands of people across all racial, class, gender, religious backgrounds. How do we do this?

Over the years, I have relied on popular education as an important component of organizing for social change. One of the main reasons that I create so many curricula is to find useful ways to disseminate knowledge that might lead to future action. I am privileged to be a member of the Chicago PIC Teaching Collective. The Teaching Collective is an all-volunteer group that organizes interactive workshops, film screenings, and trainings which aim to inspire action. We also produce educational materials and resources. We provide opportunities for youth and adults to explore issues related to mass incarceration/hyperincarceration. We focus on practical steps to inspire, inform, and enable action, and on how to develop workable alternatives.

The PIC Collective officially launched last fall and has 20 members. We’ve been working together on a couple of projects over the past few weeks. The first involves creating a 3 hour PIC 101 workshop that will be offered in our communities. The second is to create a zine that can be disseminated as we conduct our workshops.

We look forward to offering our first couple of PIC 101 workshops in April and June respectively. Below is a draft of an image that our friend, the talented Billy Dee has created for the zine.

By Billy Dee

The goal of the PIC collective is to make the invisible visible. I’ll keep you up to date about our progress as we launch our workshops this spring.

It’s been a long week and my sister sent this to me. I share it with you.

I was sent information about a documentary series that is set to premiere on the National Geographic Channel. I cannot vouch for it because I have not seen it but am passing along information to those who might be interested in watching it. I have to say upfront that I worry about the fact that the series of documentaries will be featured on National Geographic. This is not because I do not have the utmost respect for that franchise but because I worry in general about the “spectacle” aspect of punishment and imprisonment in our culture. That being said, here’s the relevant information:

HARD TIME: The Hustle
Tuesday, February 1 at 9PM ET/PT

Go inside the underground prison economy at Ohio’s Ross Correctional Institution and see inmates try their hands at different money-making strategies. A “jailhouse thief” brings his street ways within jailhouse walls, brutally robbing inmates and selling their possessions. A drug dealer on a 27-year sentence for attempted murder struggles to stay “clean” after getting caught up selling contraband at the orientation prison.

“Coffee Currency” – In prison, the going rate for little extras is measured in tablespoons of instant coffee.

“Viking or Victim” – In prison, you have to size up your fellow inmates quickly.

I have decided to start a series that will highlight various example of restorative justice in action. Here is the first installment:

A woman named Philippa Hughes was mugged last year. Here is some information about the incident:

Hughes was talking on her cell phone and walking in Shaw when the man tried to snatch it from her hands. But Hughes wouldn’t let go. In the struggle, he broke free. She ran after him, screaming — loud enough to summon College of Art and Design professor Lucy Hogg, who lives in the area, to her front door. The alleged mugger, who was apparently off balance, ran into the car in the picture.

A plains-clothes officer jumped the suspect immediately. He cuffed the mug as three more police cars arrived.

The officers told Hughes that this suspect was wanted in other snatching cases. The plains-clothes officer, who happened to be in the area to see the whole thing go down, called in for backup and was ready to act at the right moment, Hughes said.

Usually, this is where the story ends. However Ms. Hughes recently received a letter from the man who attacked her:

I am writing this letter to let you know that I apologize for what I did. I am truly sorry, I can imagine the pain and trauma I have caused in your life. You have every reason to have negative feelings towards me and to want to see me incarcerated. I am not the type of person that does stuff like that; I am a very likable and unique person with a good heart. I was at a down point in my life when I made the mistake of mugging you but that is still no excuse. I have made myself look like something I’m not. I am very disappointed in myself and embarrassed. While I was incarcerated I thought about what I did every day and that is something I have to live with for the rest of my life. I have suffered a lot while I was in jail and I changed a lot. I know you don’t want to even hear from me but I hope you can take me into consideration and hopefully one day you can find it in your heart to forgive me. And I thank you for taking time out of your day to read this letter. God bless you.

Ms. Hughes received the letter from the prosecutor’s office and is considering writing back. I hope that she decides to do so. Here is what Ms. Hughes had to say about her experience:

Hughes says that she did feel traumatized after the incident but that she welcomed the letter anyway. “I think it’s such a nice completion to the story,” she says. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

In writing about the aftermath of the Tuscon shooting rampage, Henry Giroux posits that “the general responses to this violent act are symptomatic of a society that separates private injuries from public considerations, refusing to connect individual acts to broader social considerations.” I could not agree more with Giroux on this matter. In fact, I have recently written about the American tendency to at best minimize or at worst ignore the structural underpinnings of violence. It’s a topic that I return to often.

Giroux makes the case that a ‘culture of cruelty’ permeates American society:

I want to suggest that underlying the Arizona shootings is a culture of cruelty that has become so widespread in American society that the violence it produces is largely taken for granted, often dismissed in terms that cut it off from any larger systemic forces at work in the society.

The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how entertainment and politics now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment — a moment when the central issue of getting by is no longer about working to get ahead but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, which are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of colour, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from “the American dream,” but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value.

How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform’s public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behaviour of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behaviour in need of compassionate goodwill and public assistance? Or for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system?

Giroux contends that since the mid-70’s the “social state” has been transformed into a “punishing” one. 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” has according to Giroux (2009) “both militarized public life and refashioned the criminal justice system, prisons, and even the schools, as preeminent spaces of racialized violence (p.71).” Giroux’s concept of the “culture of cruelty” becomes instructive to understanding the hyper/mass incarceration system that has emerged over the past 35 years in the U.S. A desensitized, fearful, and cowed populace that marinates in this culture of cruelty finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to see itself as complicit in the caging of millions of its fellow citizens. This same population easily accepts neoliberal policies that disenfranchise everyone except for the corporatists and their rich accomplices. In such a climate, mass incarceration becomes tolerable and even necessary as a mechanism for managing the labor supply.

Cruel culture lets us off the hook. We don’t have to understand the people who we lock up or those who work with them. Our society has come to view imprisonment as the “first resort” to addressing a host of social issues (which may or may not actually be criminal). In the U.S., the culture of cruelty it turns out is practiced and played with all of the time.

I’ll end with these words by Giroux that should give all of us great pause and cause us to mobilize to transform our culture:

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a spectacle of suffering and spectacle. While much of this violence is passed off as entertainment, it should not be surprising when it travels from the major cultural apparatuses of our time to real life, exploding in front of us, refusing to be seen as just another entertaining spectacle.

Human Rights Watch has released its 2011 World Annual Report. The report underscores some important facts and statistics about racial disparities in the U.S. mass incarceration system:

As of June 2009, the U.S. continued to have both the largest incarcerated population (2,297,400, a decrease of 0.5 percent since December 2008) and the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (748 inmates per 100,000 residents).

The burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on members of racial and ethnic minorities, a disparity which cannot be accounted for solely by differences in criminal conduct: black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times that of Hispanic males.

One in 10 black males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009; for Hispanic males the figure was 1 in 25; for white males only 1 in 64.

Blacks constitute 33.6 percent of drug arrests, 44 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state court, and 37 percent of people sent to state prison on drug charges, even though they constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population and blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates.

Other Facts:

In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained between 380,000 and 442,000 non-citizens in some 300 detention facilities, at an annual cost of U.S. $1.7 billion.

Human Rights Watch’s own analysis of government data showed that three-quarters of non-citizens deported between 1997 and 2007 were nonviolent or low-level offenders.

There are 2,574 youth offenders (persons under the age of 18 at the time they committed their offense) serving life without parole in U.S. prisons. There are no known youth offenders serving the sentence anywhere else in the world.

As of August 2010, 88,500 prison and jail inmates had experienced some form of sexual victimization between October 2008 and December 2009.

I have not written about the Kelley Williams-Bolar case previously because I did not have the words to describe how I felt about it. When I first read about the case, I immediately started to tear up and my emotions were in turmoil. I didn’t understand the strong feelings and then I realized that the case recalled ancestral memories of slavery for me. Kelley Williams-Bolar was being accused of “stealing an education” for her children.

Here is some brief background on this case…
Prosecutors in Ohio brought criminal charges against Kelly Williams-Bolar of Akron and her father. The state accused the pair of “allegedly falsifying residency records of two of the woman’s children formerly enrolled in the Copley-Fairlawn City Schools.” The most serious of the charges brought against Ms. Williams was tampering with records which is a “third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of one to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.” Her 64-year old father was charged with “one count of grand theft for aiding and abetting his daughter in her alleged deception to obtain educational services from Copley-Fairlawn schools.”

Bolar-Williams said her two girls were enrolled in the Copley-Fairlawn school system four years ago — in August 2006, according to court records — over ”safety issues.”

During the trial, several pieces of evidence were presented supporting Ms. Williams’ claims that she was in fact living with her father when she enrolled her children in the suburban school district. However what was also made clear was the lengths to which the school district went to “prove” that she was in fact not a resident in their catchment area:

School officials, according to trial testimony, hired a private investigator in an attempt to document the activities of Williams-Bolar on more than a dozen school mornings.

In several hours of the videotaped surveillance — much of which was shot under cover through a wrought-iron fence — the jury saw Williams-Bolar dropping off her children at a school bus stop within a short walk of her father’s home on Black Pond.

However, when Williams-Bolar took the stand in her own defense on Friday, O’Brien introduced evidence showing that she had 2008 and 2009 W-2 statements from her employer, Akron Public Schools, sent in her name to the address of her father in Copley Township.

Williams-Bolar works as a teaching assistant with special-needs children at Buchtel High School.

The defense also produced 2005 mailed correspondence to Williams-Bolar — more than a year before her children were enrolled in the schools — from the Copley-Fairlawn district. It, too, was sent to her father’s home.

More specific details about the trial can be found here. On January 15th, Ms. Williams was convicted by a jury after 7 hours of deliberation. She was sentenced by the judge to 10 days in jail, three years of probation and community service for falsifying residency records. As if this were not enough, here is more from the judge in this case:

Cosgrove noted Williams-Bolar faces another form of punishment.

Williams-Bolar, a single mother, works as a teaching assistant with children with special needs at Buchtel High School. At the trial, she testified that she wanted to become a teacher and is a senior at the University of Akron, only a few credit hours short of a teaching degree.

That won’t happen now, Cosgrove said.

”Because of the felony conviction, you will not be allowed to get your teaching degree under Ohio law as it stands today,” the judge said. ”The court’s taking into consideration that is also a punishment that you will have to serve.”

Williams-Bolar addressed Cosgrove briefly before being sentenced, saying ”there was no intention at all” to deceive school officials.

She pleaded with Cosgrove not to put her behind bars.

”My girls need me,” she said. ”I’ve never, ever gone a day without seeing them off. Never. My oldest daughter is 16.

”I need to be there to support them.”

Williams-Bolar’s two girls, now 16 and 12, are attending schools elsewhere. They left the Copley-Fairlawn district before the 2009 school term.

Ms. Williams-Bolar was interviewed later and expressed stunned disbelief that she would be jailed for this offense. She believed that if she were convicted she would be sentenced to probation at most.

Kelley Williams-Bolar took an extended pause, pondering as she sat in jail Thursday.

Tears came to her eyes as seconds ticked away. She’s a single mother of two daughters in the middle of a 10-day jail term — a convicted felon — all because of the school the girls attended.

Years ago, she said she took her daughters from Akron’s public housing after their home was burglarized and placed them with their grandfather in Copley Township.

Take a step back to consider everything that is at play in the story of Ms. Bolar-Williams. Here you have a black single mother who was living in public housing with her two daughters. After a traumatic incident of their home being burglarized, she moved her daughters to their grandfather’s home so that they could be safe and attend a good school. A school district spent thousands of dollars to hire a PI to investigate this black woman and her children. Why exactly was this? Are public schools in Ohio so flush with extra cash that they can afford such luxuries? If Ms. Williams and her children had been white would the school have gone to this trouble to expose them as supposed ‘criminals?’ I think that any fair-minded observer would have to say ‘no’. Now we have a tragedy on our hands with lives being destroyed. A 40 year old woman who was putting herself through college to become a teacher is having that dream dashed. What lesson do you suppose her daughters are learning in all of this? Are they learning that America is a just society? Are they learning that they can ‘be anything that they want to be’ when they become adults?

I would say that they have learned a bitter lesson about American INjustice and oppression. This is a form of state violence that the Williams family has been subjected to. Ms. Williams has been accused of defrauding the district for over $30,000 in educational costs because her daughters did not meet the residency requirement. At least four lives have been destroyed over $30,000? Surely that cannot be just!

Apparently this case is causing a lot of controversy in Ohio as well it should. Reporter David Scott writes about some of the reaction. However, I want to point to the words of commentator Boyce Watkins who wrote this:

This case is a textbook example of everything that remains racially wrong with America’s educational, economic and criminal justice systems. Let’s start from the top: Had Ms. Williams-Bolar been white, she likely would never have been prosecuted for this crime in the first place (I’d love for them to show me a white woman in that area who’s gone to jail for the same crime). She also is statistically not as likely to be living in a housing project with the need to break an unjust law in order to create a better life for her daughters. Being black is also correlated with the fact that Williams-Bolar likely didn’t have the resources to hire the kinds of attorneys who could get her out of this mess (since the average black family’s wealth is roughly 1/10 that of white families). Finally, economic inequality is impactful here because that’s the reason that Williams-Bolar’s school district likely has fewer resources than the school she chose for her kids. In other words, black people have been historically robbed of our economic opportunities, leading to a two-tiered reality that we are then imprisoned for attempting to alleviate. That, my friends, is American Racism 101.

This case is a textbook example of how racial-inequality created during slavery and Jim Crow continues to cripple our nation to this day. There is no logical reason on earth why this mother of two should be dehumanized by going to jail and be left permanently marginalized from future economic and educational opportunities. Even if you believe in the laws that keep poor kids trapped in underperforming schools, the idea that this woman should be sent to jail for demanding educational access is simply ridiculous.

In her own words, Ms. Williams said from jail:

”If I had the opportunity, if I had to do it all over again, would I have done it? . . . ,” she said. After almost a half-minute of silence, she answered her own question.

”I would have done it again,” she said. ”But I would have been more detailed. . . . I think they wanted to make an example of me.”

Yes indeed, the state of Ohio wanted to make an example of a black single mother trying to find a way to ensure a successful future for her children by giving them a chance to have a good education… Welcome to America in the 21st century, still racist and unjust!

Update: Here is a petition to sign regarding this case.

Update #2: Here’s an interview with Ms. White:

Update #3: Looks like some elected officials are getting involved in this case and looking into making sure that she can in fact become a teacher. This would be good news.

Update #4: Here is a report from Good Morning America

Folks after several hours fiddling with the layout of this blog yesterday, I have settled on this template. I had decided on another layout until I got several e-mails from friends who told me that they were unhappy with the colors and that the posts were “smushed” on their browsers. For God’s sake people….

So I went with my second choice (well actually my third) which you see here. I changed the layout in response to e-mails that I have been steadily receiving from people informing me that they were unable to post comments on the blog.

I liked the original layout of the blog and HATE change but alas.. I could not solve the mystery of the ‘submit comment’ button. Now that I have changed the design, those of you who have e-mailed (and you know who you are) better start posting comments… Just kidding, well maybe not.

Anyway, feel free to let me know what you think of the change. I have a feeling that this current layout may only be temporary as I have become obsessed with WordPress Themes now. I was supposed to be writing grant proposals and finishing work on a report but instead I found myself fiddling with this blog for hours yesterday. C’est la vie!