Monica Moorehead, leader of the Millions for Mumia campaign, was the principal speaker Nov. 13 at a meeting on America’s Criminal Injustice System that drew an audience of 120 community activists and students at SUNY/New Paltz.
Moorehead dealt at length with the concept of the "Prison-Industrial Complex"--the fusion of the privatization of prison ownership and management, the lucrative prison construction industry and the exploitation of prison labor. “The prison system in the United States is becoming capitalism’s newest sweatshop,” she said in describing the exploitation of inmate labor by large corporations. “Prisoners are paid $5 an hour booking airline flights--one-third the pay of free labor, and most prison workers earn far, far less.”
Other speakers at the meeting included Nancy Hammond, executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty; Safiya Bukhari, an advocate for political prisoners representing the Jericho Movement; Jack A. Smith of the Mid-Hudson National People’s Campaign and International Action Center, co-sponsors of the meeting; Michael Chameides, a Bard College student activist arrested during demonstrations at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia this summer; Sandra Oxford of the Coalition for Parole Restoration; and Robert Robinson of NORML.
Hammond supplied statistics about the racist nature of the death penalty and history about the struggle for abolition. Bukhari explained the plight of some 100 U.S. political prisoners under lock and key, some for up to 40 years, and urged activists “not to forget these people who have given so much.” She made a list of political prisoners available to those who wished to write to them. Smith delivered the introduction and discussed the particular injustice experienced by children sent to adult prisons. Chameides told about police mistreatment of anti-globalization demonstrators. Oxford detailed the fight for obtaining the just administration of parole for all inmates. Robinson emphasized that African-Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites for marijuana offenses, even though a considerably lower number are users. -----------------
Following are the introductory remarks of the Mid-Hudson NPC/IAC, which established the context for the meeting:
Just what do we mean by America’s Criminal Injustice System? Simply, it refers to trends in recent years which have made such a mockery of the term “Criminal Justice” that the conventional definition is undergoing a transformation into its opposite. The problem stems from distortions in the process of “justice.” My law dictionary gives the basic definition of “justice” as “1. fairness. 2. moral rightness. 3. a scheme or system of law in which every person receives his or her due from the system, including all rights, both natural and legal.” Our contention is that the criminal justice system, for scores of million of citizens, is now failing in all three criteria for justice.
It is certainly failing people of color and the poor, who constitute the bulk of those caught up in the criminal injustice system. For example, whites outnumber African-Americans 5 to 1 in terms of illegal drug use, but more than 60% of people sent to prison for drug crimes are black.
The most obvious indication of the failing system of justice is the extraordinary growth of the prison population in the United States in recent decades. When I served a year in prison during the 1960s for opposition to the Vietnam war, there were fewer than 200,000 adult inmates in America’s prisons. Multiply that by 10 and you will approximate the number of fellow citizens under lock and key today.
It took 200 years for the United States to reach the point of incarcerating one million citizens at one time. And it took less than the last 25 years to incarcerate two million at one time.
Today, while the population of our country amounts to 5% of the total population in the world, America’s prisons confine 25% of the world’s inmates. It costs federal, state and local government $40 billion a year to maintain this gigantic prison house. Some states, such as California, spend more on prisons than on education. Hardly a penny of this money goes into what used to be called rehabilitation.
The United States has executed more prisoners in the last 20 years than all the other industrial nations put together. Virtually all these people are from the working class and its poorest sub-sector. Over 670 people have been put to death in our country since 1977 and the number seems to be increasing every year. Blacks and Latinos account for 56% of the over 3,500 death-row inmates, and 42% of executions.
Many people are of the opinion that the death penalty is deterrent to murder. Statistics compiled three months ago by the New York Times, however , reveal that “10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average....The Times found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rates in state with the death penalty has been 48% to 101% higher than in states without the death penalty.”
America’s overcrowded prisons are filled with people who have committed nonviolent, victimless, crimes--the casualties of Washington’s draconian “War on Drugs.” The latest FBI statistics, according to NORML, record that during the eight years of the Clinton administration, almost 3.5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana offenses, a huge increase over earlier periods. The great majority of these arrests was for simple possession and recreational use.
Another aspect of the Criminal Injustice System concerns political prisoners. Most of this audience is well versed in the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier--but there are approximately 100 other such inmates languishing in America’s jails, and details about their plight will be described tonight.
There is also the injustice perpetrated by the authorities against protest demonstrators, featuring mass preemptive arrests, brutality, and the indiscriminate use of pepper spray and tear gas. Seattle last December, Washington in April and Philadelphia in August all come to mind.
One of the terribly cruel aspects of the Injustice System concerns children. A report earlier this year by the Department revealed that the number of children sent to adult prisons more than doubled since the mid-’80s. Thirteen states have passed laws permitting suspects as young as 16 to be prosecuted in adult courts; other states allow this barbaric practice under certain conditions. The report revealed that 60% of youth inmates in adult prisons are African-Americans.
According to the Justice Department, 9,100 youths were held in adult correctional facilities in 1997. It is a well known fact that virtually all these children are subjected to extreme sexual abuse. They are five times more likely than children in juvenile facilities to be sexually assaulted. According to a corrections officer quoted in the New Republic magazine not long ago, the chances for a young inmate to avoid being raped in an adult prison--often repeatedly over time--were “almost zero.” He continued, “He’ll get raped within the first 24 to 48 hours. That’s almost standard.” Children in adult jails are twice as likely to be beaten by guards, and eight times more likely to commit suicide than children confined to a juvenile facility.
This is an introduction to what we mean by the Criminal Injustice System. The speakers to follow will provide the facts, figures and analysis to tell the whole story. (end)