14%

I Ain't Doing Nothing But Moving On

Been a long time, I know. But now I contact you with some good news.

Recently, I was invited to write about criminal justice issues for a group blog hosted by Change.org. I accepted, and my first post was just published. (You can find it here: New Study Says...)

So, from now on my criminal justice writing can be found here. Everything else (poverty, homelessness, welfare issues, boxing, hip hop, etc) will continue to appear on 14%. I am hoping that the pressure of a regular blogging deadline will promote better work practices and force me to write more regularly. We'll see.

Cool Me Off With Your Big Crime Fighters And Your Newspaper Writers

Spencer Ackerman, one of my nearest and dearest, was kind enough to link to my antiwar movement piece this morning, and to offer some thoughts on it. 

His main critique is as follows:

One criticism of Colin’s piece, and it’s something we discussed over dinner recently: I’m not so sure that an antiwar movement needs to be an in-the-streets presence to be effective.

It's a fair question to raise and, being honest, one that I'm not certain I have an intellectually consistent answer for. In the article I sort of  edged around the issue and, rather than endorse the idea that social movements must have a mass face, I wrote:

By moving away from protests, the repertoire the public and media most associate with it, the anti-war movement is taking a big gamble. But if it successfully combines attention-grabbing street antics with congressional lobbying efforts and new claims that relate the war to the recession, the movement just might be able to bring itself out of the cold and make good on its early promise.

I stand by that passage. Any social movement that is able to apply pressure on more than one front, and utilize a variety of tactics, will have a better chance of success than one that charts a narrow, predictable course.

But Spence's point is well taken. Street protests come with baggage. (I'm responding to more than what Spence wrote today cause, as he mentioned, we had this same conversation over dinner recently.)

They have been, for some forty years now, a forum of greatest convenience for individuals that want to air grievances. Consequently, the message of a given protest is often lost within the white noise of issues raised by people concerned with everything from Mumia Abu Jamal's innocence, to recycling. That diffusion of message weakens the impact of mass gatherings. Maybe more importantly, street protests can (often do) become proxy battlegrounds for the culture war that is always simmering. By going into the street for an anti-establishment cause you are almost begging to be associated with the cultural left, and maligned because of the association.

Be that as it may, I do think there is something undeniably powerful about summoning a public presence in the streets. Mass gatherings are an important part of our understanding of power. That's why we have Labor Day parades and Veteran's Day parades, and that's why people gather on Inauguration Day. Any group that can summon a public presence has some authority, and any group that chooses not to will have to convince the public in some other way that they could if they wanted to. 

All of which is not to say that protest in and of itself is capable of pushing forward a political agenda--most often it can't--but it is an important part of the repertoire of social movements. One arrow in the quiver, if you will.

Now We're Wondering What They Were Dyin' For

The American Prospect ran a piece of mine this morning, and I recommend it to you.

It's about the antiwar movement, which is a little off-beat for me, but I think I get around the issue just fine despite that. And, I must note, this was one of the more satisfying pieces I've worked on lately because my investigation revealed that my original thesis was completely wrong. I love having my mind changed during the writing process--it means I'm actually learning something.

I began looking into this piece last November. Obama had announced that he was considering a serious escalation in Afghanistan a couple months earlier, and I was surprised that the antiwar movement had barely responded during what seemed like the ideal strategic opening--what better time to hit the streets than while the president was considering all of his options, and had not committed to any specific course of action?

I began my reporting thinking that I would find the antiwar movement to be purely reactionary, and not forward thinking enough to grasp the moment. But that turned out not to be the case.

Here are the first two grafs and a link:

In September 2009, when Barack Obama announced he was debating the merits of increasing the United States' human commitment to an unpopular war, there were no riots. The police did not square off with masked protesters, fire tear gas into streets swarming with people, or herd malcontents into protest pens. The war's opponents were nowhere to be found.

But after the die was cast, when the president announced on December 1, 2009 that he was committing 30,000 additional troops to the Afghanistan War, his critics hit the streets. The next day, hastily prepared protests took place across the country and a large "Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally," was held at the Capitol. Another major rally, to be held in D.C. on March 20, 2010, was quickly announced.

So Much Cash, Up In My Bathroom Is A Ready Teller

Sometimes the little things are so telling. 

During the Clinton administration, the IRS was instructed to compile an annual report of the income of the country's top 400 earners. For some reason the Bush administration ordered that the report not be released to the public, and it was all but forgotten until the IRS posted it online without announcement on February 16.

Just one of the thousands of little administrative decisions every president makes...but to me it says so much about the character of the president who made it. 

Unsurprisingly, it turns out Bush era plutocrats got richer, and paid fewer taxes.

David Cay Johnston has an analysis of the report, which covers 2007:

In 2007 the top 400 taxpayers had an average income of $344.8 million, up 31 percent from their average $263.3 million income in 2006, according to figures in a report that the IRS posted to its Web site without announcement that were discovered February 16.

The long-term data show that under current tax and economic rules, the incomes of the top earners rise when the economy expands and contract during recessions, only to rise again. Their effective income tax rate fell to 16.62 percent, down more than half a percentage point from 17.17 percent in 2006, the new data show. That rate is lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures, which is what each taxpayer in the top group earned in the first three hours of 2007.

And, my favorite tidbits:

The top 400's share of all income grew from 1.31 cents out of every dollar earned by all Americans to 1.59 cents.

Adjusted for inflation to 2009 dollars, the top 400 enjoyed a 27 percent increase in their income, or nine times the rate of increase for the bottom 90 percent, based on an earlier analysis of tax data published by Profs. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists at the University of California at Berkeley who have been studying global income trends.

Since 1992, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes rise by 13 percent in 2009 dollars, compared with an increase of 399 percent for the top 400.

Never No Good News, Just More Strife

Seeing it has been a minute, how about a little news roundup?

Merced, CA, is in the process of siting an encampment to which they will banish all of their homeless sex offenders. Seems like a difficult process, involving a lot of NIMBYism, and the desire to make the lives of the homeless in question as untenable as possible: "Many of the services used by camp residents are across town, and the homeless usually have to walk or bike to use them."

Financial concerns have forced Texas to announce cuts to their prison system totaling $294 million, which would result in a projected loss of 3,100 jobs, including prison guards and parole officers. Unsurprisingly, "Legislative leaders immediately called for the prison system and other public safety agencies to be spared from the proposed cuts."

Michigan's Governor wants to release 7,500 prisoners early ("Most of the savings would come by allowing inmates to shave time off their sentences for good behavior and letting more offenders be released under electronic monitoring outside of prison")....which is pissing off the state's prospectors: "'It's bad public policy,' Isabella County Prosecutor Larry Burdick said. 'I think it makes the citizens of our state less safe.'"

And in New York, where 5,000 empty prison beds are costing the state money every minute, it doesn't seem possible to make cuts, says the NYT:

"The prison industry is the foundation of local economies in many parts of the state. And for years, the correctional facilities spread throughout the vast rural stretches of the state helped protect Republican legislative districts from dwindling populations — the inmates are counted as permanent residents when maps are drawn for the Senate and the Assembly."

Up in Mass where, in 2005, about 12,000 high school students were homeless, "the number of high school students who become homeless after turning 18 has increased dramatically in recent years..."

And finally, a new survey in Denver, CO, has determined that "Nearly half of Denver's homeless people have a chronic disease, mental illness or other condition that puts them at higher risk of dying prematurely."

So it goes.

Cuz I'm A Teenager With A Little Bit Of Gold And A Pager

Bob Herbert had an excellent column in the NYT the other day. And I reccomend it to everyone.

In it he chews through the NYPD's stop and frisk records for 2009, documenting that:

"We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.

"An overwhelming 84 percent of the stops in the first three-quarters of 2009 were of black or Hispanic New Yorkers. It is incredible how few of the stops yielded any law enforcement benefit. Contraband, which usually means drugs, was found in only 1.6 percent of the stops of black New Yorkers. For Hispanics, it was just 1.5 percent. For whites, who are stopped far less frequently, contraband was found 2.2 percent of the time.

"The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason."

I don't have much to add to that, I just want to throw my hat in the ring with him as he calls this what it is: "Jim Crow policing." And I want to urge everyone to read that passage a second time: Only 6 of every 100 police stops resulted in an arrest--and that's among documented police stops. As Herbert notes later:

"These encounters with the police are degrading and often frightening, and the real number of people harassed is undoubtedly higher than the numbers reported by the police. Often the cops will stop, frisk and sometimes taunt people who are at their mercy, and then move on — without finding anything, making an arrest, or recording the encounter as they are supposed to.

What I do want to take on is the claim, by the police commissioner's spokesperson, that these stops are "life saving." They're not. Stopping people for no reason and humiliating them in public does nothing but degrade an already strained relationship between citizens and the police force. This is doubly true when stops are made based on race and justified by using racially tinged code phrases like: wearing clothes "commonly used in crime," "inappropriate attire for the season," or for making "furtive movements."

When cops harass a group in such a systematic way they (justifiably) lost their trust. And then those people don't call the cops when it might be warranted. And they have no option but to settle their disputes extra judicially. A vicious cycle.

(Sadly, it must be noted there's nothing new about this...it's just the latest episode. The story's been the same so long it's hard to even get worked up about it anymore--harder still to claim that when cops act like cops it will make their relationship with the people they police worse. Comparative measures are tricky like that.)

You Tell Me The World's Changed; Once I Made You Rich Enough, Rich Enough To Forget My Name

Close your eyes and conjure an image to accompany the word 'poverty.'

When I do that I get sheets of cardboard laying over subway grates, people pushing grocery carts wearing baggy coats stuffed with newspaper for insulation, and the inside of a welfare office filled with the stink of purgatory. I'll wager good money most people get similar images, because aside from a brief period in the 1960s when the country decided to care about the Appalachians, poverty has been thought of as a predominantly urban problem.

Seems like that might change, soon. A fascinating new study from the Brookings Institute is claiming that between 2000 and 2008 the poverty rate grew fastest in the nation's suburbs. During that time the number of people below the poverty line in central cities grew by 581,694 (5.6%), and the number of people below the poverty line in suburbs grew by 2,500,194 (25%).

During that period the total number of people living below the poverty line grew by 5,208,610--almost half of that growth was in the suburbs.

Significantly, the large social service safety nets that many cities developed over the course of the last several decades are largely non-existent in the suburbs. Which means the newly disenfranchised are less likely to receive the assistance they are eligible for (meager though that may be). Food stamps, one of the least stigmatizing forms of welfare, are a good case in point. As the report notes, "Suburbs in general, though home to more poor than their primary cities, showed lower rates of food stamp receipt than their city counterparts in 2008—39.2 percent of poor families in cities used food stamps in that year compared to 32 percent of suburban poor families."

The way growth in the suburban poverty rate was distributed is also of note. Poverty increased most drastically in the suburbs of some cities famous for white flight. Cleveland's suburban poverty rate rose 9.3% in eight years; Baltimore's jumped 9.2%; Detroit's increase was 9.1%; Chicago's was 9.1% and Philadelphia's was 4.5%.

When reading through the report I couldn't help but think of a trip I took through the Rust Belt last year. I was with a friend and we arrived in Youngstown, OH, with nothing in our stomachs but liquor. We went looking for a meal and walked through the city without finding a single place to eat. There were (no exaggeration) only four businesses open in all of downtown Youngstown. We had to drive into the suburbs to find an open eating establishment, and when we got there there were dozens.

For decades that has been the trend. Businesses, the upper working class and the middle class have fled cities they perceive to be blighted in favor of unincorporated areas with lower taxes and looser regulations. That population shift had serious repercussions for cities like Youngstown, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore...eventually, essentially, crippling them.

Now, it seems, the lack of a vibrant, viable urban core for those suburbs is causing the same type of decline that central cities started experiencing a few decades back when white flight was in vogue. If it weren't such a serious issue I'd be inclined to quip that turnaround is fair play.   

Without A Gun And A Badge, What Do Ya Got?

I opened this post with the intention of giving officer Kevin Maloney some respect for breaking the Blue Wall of Silence by testifying this afternoon in open court that he saw a fellow officer sodomize a handcuffed man (Michael Mineo) in the Brooklyn subway.

Then I remembered Chris Rock's rule: You don't thank people for doing what they're supposed to do.

And it struck me hard that in this day and age--and in a circumstance like this where a restrained and unarmed man is violated for no reason but malice--it's still a pleasant surprise when a cop doesn't lie to protect another cop.

I Pulled Into Nazareth, I Was Feelin' About Half Past Dead

Tax season is upon us, providing some with a fresh opportunity to fleece the poor of what little they have.

The Woodstock Institute has just released a new report on "refund anticipation loans (RALs)," which are high-cost loans provided by for-profit lenders that give tax return filers immediate access to their anticipated returns.

The report's findings, in a nut shell, are that poor people are disproportionately seeking quick access to their expected returns. "Nationwide, the highest percentage of RAL consumers are taxpayers that qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the government’s largest anti-poverty program."

That wouldn't be so bad except that RALs reduce expected returns by about 10%. Nationwide (in 2006, the year the study was based on) taxpayers spent approximately $900 million on them. That's $900 million transferring from working people to lending institutions that are accepting virtually no risk because the loans they are granting will be repaid by the Treasury.

The highlights of the report are below (all findings are based on data from Illinois): 

EITC recipients are more likely to use RALs to get their tax refund...6.8 percent of the total tax returns filed in Illinois in 2006 included a request for a refund anticipation loan. However, over 27 percent of taxpayers who were EITC recipients used RALs to receive their refund, while only 3.2 percent of non-EITC recipients utilized a RAL.

In Illinois, RAL usage is highest in highly African American communities for both EITC and non-EITC recipients...in African American communities, 40.1 percent of EITC recipients requested their refunds through RALs compared to 27.2 percent of EITC recipients statewide. This means that EITC recipients in African American ZIP codes were 1.5 times more likely to use a RAL than were EITC recipients statewide. This disparity is even greater when looking at taxpayers who did not get an EITC. Statewide only 3.2 percent of non-EITC taxpayers used a RAL to receive their tax refund compared to 11.6 percent in highly African American communities. 

Low wealth taxpayers accounted for the majority of RAL users... Over 60 percent of Illinois RAL users (in 2006)received the EITC. This percentage is even more pronounced in African American communities. Of RAL users in highly African American communities, nearly 72 percent were EITC recipients.

Recipients of the EITC spent a far greater share of their tax returns on RAL fees than did non-EITC recipients... In Illinois, EITC recipients collectively spent $68.9 million on RAL fees. This represents 2.5 percent of the total refunds received by EITC recipients. By contrast, non-EITC recipients spend $45.3 million on RALs, or 0.4 percent of all non-EITC refunds. Looking at the percent of a return spent on RAL fees, EITC recipients spend more than six times as much of their return on RALs as did non-EITC recipients.

Regardless of EITC status, taxpayers in African American communities spent the largest share of their tax refunds on RALs...recipients in communities 80 percent or more African American spent 3.3 percent of their returns on RALs, while EITC recipients in predominantly white communities spent 2.4 percent of their returns on RALs. Non-EITC recipients in communities 80 percent or more African American spent 1.7 percent of their returns on RALs, while non- EITC recipients in predominantly white communities spent only 0.3 percent of their returns on RALs.

They Got It Wrong Behind The Rabid Barks For Justice

As I've been reporting for a while, the recession has forced several states to reconsider their awe-inspiring, bankruptcy threatening, criminal justice budgets. Some have made the right decision and crafted plans that reduce their prison populations, others went the other way and reduced spending by privatizing prison services.

In California the debate over how to tackle the budget crisis is still raging, and a group calling itself "Families to Amend Three Strikes" has just entered the fray. Given the State's $20 billion deficit, and the fact their prisons are filled to nearly double capacity, you'd think they would find some support in the legislature. But it is not to be so:

"State Sens. Jeff Denham of Atwater and Dave Cogdill of Modesto said they oppose early release of inmates as a budget-saving measure.

"Opening our prison doors early will only open a floodgate of crime, and that's a risk no Californian should be willing to take," Cogdill said Friday."

Neither did they find the Governor to be supportive. The budget proposed by the Austrian Oak called for a $1.2 billion reduction in prison spending, but it did not include any changes to three strikes (It did include some positive measures like reducing the juvenile detention population, and moving non-violent offenders out of prisons and into local jails.).

I raise all this, in part, because the article describing the advocacy of "Families to Amend Three Strikes" contained an illustrative quote from a District Attorney that opposes their efforts.

"In Stanislaus County, District Attorney Birgit Fladager said she believes the early release of three- strikers would result in a "schizophrenic system" that does injustice to the victims of serious crimes...

"I think there needs to be some finality in what we do in the criminal justice system," Fladager said.

"Otherwise ... victims never will have the assurance that a sentence that was determined to be fair and just by a judge will be carried out."

Now, I don't want to pick on Ms Fladager too much because the sentiment she is expressing is the same expressed by nearly everyone that advocates harsh sentencing; but I do want to point out that what she is saying runs contrary to the idea of a state sanctioned justice system.

Crippling penalties are often legislated and enforced by appealing to the needs of crime victims, but that justification is visceral and not logical.

The purpose of an organized system of justice is to remove individual gratification from the calculus of criminal penalties. The idea being that as citizens we're bound by the social contract, and forfeit any right to claims we would otherwise have for individual justice in deference to the state, which is supposedly impartial. The apparatus of the state is supposed to determine what the proper punishment for the harm done to society (not the individual) by a criminal is. 

But we overlook this fact all the time. People harmed by crime make (understandably) emotional appeals, lawmakers latch onto them as expedient vehicles for their ambitions, and unreasonably harsh sentences are codified as law.

In time, those penalties punish society collectively by diverting absurd amounts of money to the criminal justice system, to the detriment of the rest of the social safety net. It's a dangerous cycle, and it gets reinforced almost daily by claims like the one made above.