America imprisons women in astonishing numbers. The population of women in state prisons has increased by more than eight hundred per cent in the past four decades. The number of women in local jails is fourteen times higher than it was in the nineteen-seventies; most of these women haven’t been convicted of a crime but are too poor to post bail while awaiting trial. The majority have been charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, shoplifting, and parole violations. The result is that more than a quarter of a million children in the U.S. have a mother in jail. One in nine black children has a parent who is, or has been, incarcerated.
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America's Other Family-Separation Crisis | The New Yorker - 0 views
Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding | naked capitalism - 0 views
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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o
Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics: When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Service... - 0 views
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Today, states grapple with decarceration and deinstitutionalization, not necessarily because of an ethical recognition of the continuing harm of confinement and segregation, or because of an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, and punishment in the United States, but because of a desire to curb public spending on social services. These include the very services that people need as alternatives to more oppressive edifices and as preventive measures to winding up in such places. While public neighborhood urban schools, public housing, and mental health clinics are shuttered, private companies and “not for profit” services partially fill the void.
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Alternatives emerge when facilities shut their doors. Closures, as prison justice organizer Angela Davis suggests, provide an opportunity for not only a “radical imagining” of the kind of social landscape desperately needed—but also the moment to build it. As people move between different forms and scales of cages, and as patterns of surveillance and punishment morph, new forms of capture do emerge and yet resistance is also possible. The state often refuses to offer services in place of the ones that were shuttered, leaving the responsibility to the individual (or her family and the market). This is a moment to collectively demand, fund, and build public infrastructure that will move everyone closer towards a world that does not rely on segregation and confinement, or access to private capital, as its mode of dealing with structural inequities.
Jeff Sessions is shamefully undermining WEB Du Bois's legacy | Marc Mauer - 0 views
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Since 2002, the US Department of Justice’s WEB Du Bois program has sponsored research fellowships on issues of race and criminal justice. During Republican and Democratic administrations, a diverse group of academics have carried the spirit of the noted sociologist and civil rights leader to the race challenges of the 21st century. Given the racial disparity endemic at every stage of the justice system the DoJ’s investigation of these issues has been praiseworthy. But with Jeff Sessions as attorney general exploring the roots of this injustice may now be compromised. In the recently released solicitation for the Du Bois fellowships the DoJ invited scholars to engage in research on five issues arising out of the “tough on crime” era that would make a student of the Du Bois legacy shudder. Whereas Du Bois is widely known for promoting the idea that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line”, the DoJ solicitation displays no interest in such high-profile issues as police killings of unarmed black men or the impact of mass incarceration on the African American community. Instead, “protecting police officers” is the only area of law enforcement prioritized by the DoJ. Another research priority, “enhancing immigration enforcement”, coming at a moment when barely disguised racist imagery accompanies those policies, seems particularly jarring when upheld in the name of a civil rights legend. The DoJ approach to research is unfortunately consistent with the misconstrued “law and order” agenda that Jeff Sessions has brought to his leadership. Within a month of taking office Sessions had rescinded the Obama-era decision to phase out federal contracting with private prisons. That initiative had been based in part on an inspector general’s finding that such prisons had higher levels of assault and safety concerns than public prisons.
America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People - Evonomics - 0 views
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In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration – check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check.
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