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Restoring Prisoners' Access to Education Reduces Recidivism |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50653"><span class="small">James McWilliams, Pacific Standard</span></a>
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Thursday, 25 April 2019 12:43 |
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McWilliams writes: "If the bill passes, 463,000 prisoners will become eligible for federal financial support toward earning a college degree, which experts argue could go a long way toward improving life after incarceration."
Incarcerated students. (photo: AP)
Restoring Prisoners' Access to Education Reduces Recidivism
By James McWilliams, Pacific Standard
25 April 19
Bipartisan legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives would make prisoners eligible for Pell Grants, reversing a clause in the 1994 crime bill that stripped such eligibility.
 s of early April, imprisoned Americans stand to gain easier access to a higher education. Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Representatives Danny Davis (D-Illinois), Jim Banks (R-Indiana), and French Hill (R-Arkansas) introduced a bipartisan piece of legislation to restore Pell Grant access to the incarcerated. If the bill passes, 463,000 prisoners will become eligible for federal financial support toward earning a college degree, which experts argue could go a long way toward improving life after incarceration.
Established under the Higher Education Act of 1965, Pell Grants—named after Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell—offer undergraduates from low-income families financial assistance for various post-baccalaureate programs. At the law's outset, prisoners were eligible to apply. Then, spurred by Democrats hoping to appear tough on crime, Congress passed the 1994 Crime Act, which (among other measures) banned Pell Grant eligibility for the incarcerated. "Making life difficult for prisoners was the order of the day," said Kevin Ring, a congressional staffer at the time and now president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a non-profit advocacy group. "Whether the punitive measures made communities safer or not didn't seem to worry anyone."
Several studies have since underscored the cost of that indifference. A RAND meta-analysis of the literature published in 2018 found that "inmates participating in correctional education programs were 28% less likely to recidivate when compared with inmates who did not participate in correctional education programs." The United States Sentencing Commission similarly revealed that inmates with less than a high school diploma had recidivism rates of over 60 percent, while those with a college degree had a 19 percent recidivism rate.
The economic benefits of prisoner education have become equally clear. According to the RAND analysis, "Every dollar invested in correctional education saves nearly five in reincarceration costs over three years." Another study, published in 2019 by researchers at the Vera Institute of Justice and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, showed that restoring Pell Grant access to prisoners would increase their employment rate by 10 percent and their collective earnings by $45 million in the first year after release.
Efforts to renew prisoners' Pell access began in 2015, when the Obama administration launched the Second Chance Pell pilot program, designed to explore prison reform by bringing Pell Grants back to prisoners on a limited basis at 67 colleges and universities around the country. Rachel Frick Cardelle, vice president of lifelong learning and workforce development at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, says that the Second Chance program at MWCC turned out to be "a tremendous opportunity" that provided students who were about to leave prison with "a sense of hope as well as the tools to make sure they stayed on the straight and narrow."
Instructors who experienced the Second Chance program note that prison provides an unusually effective place to work toward a college degree. Damian Zurro, who teaches writing and composition at the University of Notre Dame, has been working with prisoners through the Moreau College Initiative for many years. He says that, when teaching prisoners, you "literally have a captive audience that has nothing but time to undertake slow, deliberate thinking at its best." He adds that his students have "the first-hand experience with what human beings can go through," a quality that "affects how they learn."*
Narratives from prisoners have offered perhaps the most compelling testimony of Second Chance's effectiveness. When Shon Holman was incarcerated in a Tennessee prison he saw a number of prisoners attending a night class. He inquired about it and "the next day I found the director to said 'I want to be part of this.'" Holman dove in, taking 18 hours of credits over three semesters—including courses in ethics, English, psychology, and science—before moving on to finish his degree after his release at Nashville State Community College.
"I believe by being in an environment like that," he says about his time studying in prison, "I was able to put aside some of the things that traditional students have to deal with—you don't have to worry about paying rent or going grocery shopping." Today, Holman is in graduate school at East Tennessee State, where he's studying to become an academic adviser.
As success stories from the Second Chance program have accumulated (and as the program was renewed and expanded in June of 2016), long-standing opposition to federal spending on college courses for convicted criminals began to diminish. In 2014, New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo encountered a wave of anger—mostly coming from conservatives and college students—over his proposal to offer free college education to prisoners. But in 2017, armed with evidence generated in part from the Second Chance successes, Cuomo had little trouble getting $7.3 million approved for education in correctional facilities.
The Trump administration has also softened its position on prison reform. After brandishing "tough-on-crime" rhetoric early in his administration, the president now embraces the economic logic of preparing prisoners for life after incarceration.
In December of 2018, President Donald Trump endorsed the Senate's First Step Act, which promotes prison rehabilitation—but did not address the question of Pell access. Mark Inch, Trump's former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wrote the following in the bill's favor: "Retribution and incapacitation is just, and rehabilitation and restoration is an expression of mercy. I call on those who focus on the first, at the exclusion of the second, to search your heart for mercy. I call on those that focus on the second, to remember the cost of crime to society and victims, and temper your advocacy in light of these facts."
Rare though it is, all sides seems to agree that such a balanced a perspective will benefit every lower-income citizen, whether inside a prison or not, seeking to earn a college degree.
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FOCUS: The Fox News Faux Fight With Democrats |
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Thursday, 25 April 2019 11:58 |
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Mayer writes: "Judging from the reaction of some critics, Pete Buttigieg is crossing into new enemy territory by becoming the third major Democratic Presidential candidate to appear in a town-hall interview hosted by Fox News."
Hillary Clinton at a Fox News town hall with host Brett Baier, in March, 2016. (photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty)
The Fox News Faux Fight With Democrats
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
25 April 19
 udging from the reaction of some critics, Pete Buttigieg is crossing into new enemy territory by becoming the third major Democratic Presidential candidate to appear in a town-hall interview hosted by Fox News. Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, tweeted that, by doing so, Buttigieg was “putting an imprimatur of legitimacy on one of the most destructive forces in American politics.” Last week, the Times declared that Fox News was becoming “an unlikely new hot spot for Democratic candidates.”
At the same time, other critics condemned a statement by Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that Fox News isn’t “fair and neutral” enough politically to host a 2020 Democratic primary debate. Perez’s decision was criticized by both conservatives and fellow-Democrats, including Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a previous D.N.C. chair, who called it “a mistake.” Lost in the finger-pointing is the fact that neither the appearance by Democratic Presidential candidates on Fox, nor the Party’s eschewing of Fox as a host for its debates, is new.
When asked, Fox News provided no evidence that it had ever hosted a Democratic Presidential-primary debate. Perez has not changed the Party’s position so much as stuck to it. The difference is that, for the first time, Perez has publicly articulated the D.N.C.’s reasons. Perez initially cited my New Yorker story from March, which delineated Fox News’ many close ties to President Trump. More recently, he doubled down, telling the Fox News host Bill Hemmer, “I don’t have faith in your leadership at Fox News at the senior levels.” Perez added, “I have great respect for Bret [Baier] and for Chris [Wallace] and for you, but you’ve demonstrated that, above your pay grade, they don’t trust your own listeners, and so they feel like they have to put the thumb on the scale.”
Liberals have long denounced Fox News as biased, and during Obama’s first term his Administration tried to bar the network from covering an official briefing at the Treasury Department. Other news outlets, however, protested in solidarity with Fox, and the Administration backed off, fully reinstating the Fox correspondents. Democratic Presidential candidates over the years have appeared more frequently on other networks, but there is no history of Democratic Presidential candidates boycotting Fox News.
During the 2016 primary, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appeared on the avowedly conservative network. Clinton, who had not appeared on Fox News during the previous two years, initially said that she had a scheduling conflict that would prevent her from joining a Fox News town hall planned for March, 2016. But after Sanders affirmed that he would appear, she joined him.
In fact, during the last Presidential campaign cycle, the only candidate to make a public show of boycotting Fox News was Donald Trump. During the primary season, Trump refused to participate in a Republican debate on the network, to protest what he claimed had been disrespectful treatment by the host Megyn Kelly in a previous Fox debate. Additionally, in March of 2016, Trump pulled out of an event on Fox News that his campaign initially showed great interest in joining, in which he was to appear in a one-on-one face-off against Sanders. (After Trump withdrew, Clinton took Trump’s place.)
At the time, Sanders’s chief strategist, Tad Devine, explained the decision to go on Fox News, telling the Times, “I don’t think we think that boycotting that network is a way to gain political advantage with voters.” Sanders has explained his decision to appear during this cycle in much the same way. Yet when he appeared on a Fox News town-hall forum this year, some expressed surprise, even though Devine predicted back in 2016 that Sanders would return to the network. “If we have these opportunities in the future, I think we’ll try and take advantage of them,” he told the Times.
The same was true in earlier Presidential campaigns. Democrats may have grumbled about Fox News, and held their noses when they appeared on the channel, but the Party’s Presidential candidates have long appeared on the network, even submitting to interviews by unapologetically biased opinion-show hosts. In 2008, for instance, Clinton sat for an hourlong interview with Bill O’Reilly, then a famously caustic Fox News opinion host, whose contract was later discontinued following revelations that he had paid millions of dollars to settle multiple sexual-harassment claims. Fox News hosts also interviewed Clinton in 2014, as part of a book-promotion tour.
In 2011, President Obama appeared on Fox News two months before he formally launched his reëlection campaign. As David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist, told the Times, in 2016, “I always thought it was a mistake to ignore them.” He acknowledged, “Obviously there’s a bent to Fox and the viewer. But they have a pretty large audience, and they’re not all conservative Republicans. There are independent voters there.”
So why the uproar now? Fox has become ever more openly aligned with Trump, raising the political ante for Democrats who are seen as coöperating with it. But regardless of the prominence of the network’s increasingly dogmatic opinion hosts, Sanders, Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar, whose own town hall is scheduled for early May, are not blazing a new trail. Nor is Fox demonstrating newfound credibility or power. As for conservative criticism of Perez’s opposition to Fox hosting Democratic primary debates, all he has done is hold a previously established party line.
Evidently, among those unaware of this is the President. After Sanders participated in an hour-long April 16th Fox town hall moderated by Baier and Martha MacCallum, Trump expressed his dismay on Twitter. Intimating that Sanders was an interloper on a network that the President apparently considers his fiefdom, Trump tweeted, “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews. Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the ‘audience’ was so smiley and nice. Very strange.” Trump went on, adding in the royal plural, “and now we have @donnabrazile?” It appears that the President was unfamiliar with the history.
Whether Democratic Presidential candidates should continue to work with Fox News, given its growing role as a propaganda platform for the Trump White House, is a question worthy of debate. But rather than sniping among themselves themselves for essentially upholding the status quo, Democrats ought to aim their fire at Fox News for making coöperation with it more indefensible by the day.
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RSN: Trump's Real Russkie Running Mate Is Jim Crow ... and WAR! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Thursday, 25 April 2019 10:47 |
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Wasserman writes: "So the Mueller Report confirms that the Russians intervened to elect their money launderer of choice. What else is new?"
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Getty)
Trump's Real Russkie Running Mate Is Jim Crow ... and WAR!
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
25 April 19
 o the Mueller Report confirms that the Russians intervened to elect their money launderer of choice.
What else is new?
Putin and company will be back in 2020 on behalf of their wholly-owned asset. They’ll be more powerful and sophisticated than ever, marching in lockstep with their fellow mega-corporations and terminal polluters. A victory would let them complete the fascist assault on what’s left of American democracy.
They’ll also be poised to destroy our ability to survive on this planet. It should be clear to all that the human species will not survive another five years of Trump’s fossil/nuke-crazed attack on our ecological support systems.
And they’ll have two other key allies: Jim Crow, and War.
The debate over how much to focus on “Russiagate” is futile … and misses the point. As outlined by Craig Unger and David Cay Johnston, Trump has been owned by Russian oligarchs for decades. He was bankrupt and in debt by up to $6 billion. Then he was doing mega-deals in cash.
All those rubles came from the rising mafiosi who emerged from the gulag and carved up the corpse of the Soviet Union. In 1999, with the help of the CIA, Putin whipped them into shape. They used Trump to launder their cash into the American banking system and real estate markets. He’s been the Russians’ wholly owned subsidiary for decades.
That they intervened in the 2016 election is beyond obvious. Their net impact is unclear. But they worked in tandem with the usual American mega-billionaires and corporate polluters. Trump paid them back with gargantuan tax benefits, huge subsidies and ecological pork. Along with the evangelical Christians, they’ll be out in force to complete the coup in 2020.
Their prime ally will be Jim Crow. Key to all Republican presidential “victories” in this century has been the race-based disenfranchisement of citizens of color. Governor Jeb Bush stripped more than 90,000 in Florida 2000. Secretary of State Ken Blackwell stripped more than 300,000 in Ohio 2004. Core operatives stripped untold millions in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in 2016.
Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton have yet to say or do anything about it.
Now Trump is taking the lynch mob to a new level. He’s manipulating the census, injecting a citizenship clause (likely soon to be rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court), demanding ID, and escalating the usual fraud, intimidation, and theft. Come Election Day 2020, millions of suspected anti-Trump voters (mostly of color) will find themselves off the registration rolls all across the nation.
Despite advances in vote counting technology, GOP manipulators will also hold onto touchscreen, scantron, and other voting devices that will allow them to flip the vote count where stripping the voter rolls has not been enough.
Rest assured the high-priced Trump-Putin-Koch-corporate-evangelical-polluter operatives are hard at work figuring out how to strip and flip just enough votes to make sure the Electoral College cements American fascism for all time to come.
They do face a formidable task. Even the redacted Mueller Report fed a substantial plunge in Trump’s ratings, indicating at least some of his base may be cracking. As more of his criminal filth continues to seep out, the nation is likely to turn even harder against him.
The hopeful Sandernista transition of the Democrat party from its corporate death grip to a more progressive reality complicates things. And thanks to Stacey Abrams, the issue of stolen elections is finally on the table. In addition to real social and ecological progressivism, the candidates who take most seriously the issues of election protection are the ones who must be most strongly supported.
But then there’s the Kill Factor: WAR. When presidential advisor Karl Rove realized in 2003 that George W. Bush was about to lose re-election, he did the obvious thing: he went full military. The attack on Iraq was never about 9/11 or terrorism … it was always about making the very unpopular W. a war president.
It worked. John Kerry and the mainstream Democrats rolled over. To this day, they’ve said nothing about the theft of Ohio 2004. And some still defend their support of a worthless, useless, trumped-up slaughter that killed millions and cost trillions.
Never doubt that Trump is about to do the same. Be it Venezuela or Iran, Korea or Grand Fenwick, rest assured GOP operatives are hard at work mapping the target, scope, and timing for the coming conflagration.
Count on it coming on the heels of a “terror attack.” And remember that the Sedition and Espionage Acts are still on the books.
In the 1790s, John Adams used the Sedition Act to lock up journalistic critics (including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson). Exactly a century ago, the awful Woodrow Wilson used the Espionage Act to imprison the great Socialist Eugene V. Debs. Under cover of a useless, worthless war opposed by most of the American people, Wilson concocted a “Red Scare” to forcibly crush the American Socialist Party, which revered and respected the Bill of Rights far more than our “Democratic” president.
Today, as American Socialism is being reborn, we can expect the same from Trump. As his criminal roots are progressively exposed and his ratings plummet, he will do the Rovian obvious. A “terror attack” will occur. The roundup will begin. The registration rolls will be stripped. The Supreme Court will back him (5-4). The coup will deepen.
Most likely we are entering the most terrifying and trying time in our nation’s history. We need politicians and activists ready to withstand the whirlwind. The stakes could not be higher.
Harvey Wasserman’s Green Power & Wellness Show is podcast at prn.fm; California Solartopia is broadcast at KPFK-Pacifica, 90.7 fm, Los Angeles. His Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Solartopia will soon be at www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Packing the Supreme Court |
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Thursday, 25 April 2019 08:26 |
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Reich writes: "The Supreme Court heard arguments today on the Trump administration's decision to alter the 2020 Census to ask people if they are American citizens."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Packing the Supreme Court
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
25 April 19
 he Supreme Court heard arguments today on the Trump administration’s decision to alter the 2020 Census to ask people if they are American citizens.
In a former life, I argued cases before the Supreme Court. From what I gathered today, it looks as if the five Republican appointees to the Court have already decided this move by Trump is constitutional.
But it’s not. The U.S. Constitution calls for “actual enumeration” of the total population for an explicit purpose: To count the residents – not just citizens, residents – of every state to properly allocate congressional representatives to the states based on population.
Asking whether someone is a citizen is likely to cause some immigrants — not just non-citizens, but also those with family members or close friends who aren’t citizens — not to respond for fear that they or their loved ones would be deported. In the current climate of fear, this isn’t an irrational response.
The result would be a systemic undercounting of immigrant communities. The Census Bureau has already calculated that it’s likely to result in a 5.1 percent undercount of noncitizen households.
This would have two grossly unfair results.
In the first place, these communities and the states they’re in would get less federal aid. Census data is used in over 132 programs nationwide to allocate over $675 billion each year.
An undercount would deprive many immigrant communities and their states of the health care, education and assistance they need and are entitled to.
Secondly, these communities and the states they’re in would have fewer representatives in Congress. The Census count determines the distribution of congressional seats among states. Under the Constitution, these seats depend on the total number of people residing in the state, not just citizens.
Which is the real reason for this move by the Trump administration.
It’s no secret that immigrants with the right to vote tend to vote for Democrats. So undercounting neighborhoods that are heavily Latino or Asian would mean fewer Democratic members of Congress.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says the citizenship question is necessary in order to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Baloney. The Trump administration has shown zero interest in the Voting Rights Act. It has even defended voter suppression laws in court.
This is nothing but a Republican power grab orchestrated by the White House.
If Chief Justice John Roberts sides with his four Republican colleagues on this, the ruling will be the third in a series of landmark 5-to-4 Roberts Court decisions whose main purpose is to cement Republican control of federal and state governments.
The first and second were “Shelby County in 2013, which gutted the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and last year’s Janus decision, declaring that public employees don’t have to pay union dues.
Mitch McConnell’s long-term strategy of packing the Court in order to entrench the Republican Party is becoming an obscene reality.
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ive years. That’s how much time has passed since the City of Flint switched its water source, exposing nearly 100,000 people to lead-tainted water. That crisis continues today and has traumatized the city in a way that will take more than another five years to fix. The legacy will likely last for generations.
