Politics

Think Prison Abolition in America Is Impossible? It Once Felt Inevitable

Monday, 21 May 2018 08:27

Excerpt: "To end mass incarceration, we need prison abolition. Impossible? Not so long ago, prison abolition felt almost inevitable."

A prisoner. (photo: Getty Images)

Think Prison Abolition in America Is Impossible? It Once Felt Inevitable

By Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, Guardian UK

21 May 18

In the 1960s and 1970s, attorneys general and Republican congressmen were among the many arguing that prison was immoral. Can those days return?

ith amazing speed, ending mass incarceration has become a priority not only for leftists but also for centrists and even for some on the right. Jared Kushner recently classed prisoners with other �forgotten men and women� championed by Donald Trump. But none of the reforms on the table will actually end mass incarceration. Even if tomorrow we release every non-violent drug offender, every ageing prisoner and everyone who is in jail solely because they can�t make their bail � and we should do those things � the United States would still have an incarceration rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer nations.

To end mass incarceration, we need prison abolition. Impossible? Not so long ago, prison abolition felt almost inevitable.

Juan G Morales belonged to the 1970s crush of incarcerated men and women who asked the courts to ease the harshness of prison life. Morales was incarcerated in the state of Wisconsin, and his jailers were not allowing him to exchange letters with his lover. He brought an action in federal court against the state in order for his right to correspondence to be restored. His case came to Judge James E Doyle, father to a future governor.

Doyle sided with Morales, and the language he employed says much about how the prison system was viewed by mainstream America at that time: �I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.�

In the years after Doyle wrote, the prison population soared, imprisonment became a predominant feature of American life, and a world without prisons became even more difficult to imagine. Yet Doyle�s words reflected a very real sense common to the early 1970s that the end of the prison could be quite near. The Norwegian criminologist and prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen describes this historical moment � not only in the US, but across the Atlantic as well � as the only time in the history of the prison when prison abolition was a real possibility. We are reaching another such moment, and we ought to learn from what went wrong nearly a half-century ago. Among the reasons the protean movement to abolish prisons fizzled was its refusal to speak in plainly moral terms. In foregrounding pragmatic reforms, 1970s prison reformers turned away from the rich abolitionist heritage and failed to generate the force necessary for effecting radical social change.

Michelle Alexander�s book The New Jim Crow has done much of late to introduce the massive scale of the injustices involved in the prison system to a mainstream audience, but from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, there were any number of such publication events: Karl Menninger�s The Crime of Punishment (1968), Nigel Walker�s Sentencing in Rational Society (1969), Richard Harris�s The Fear of Crime (1969), former attorney general Ramsey Clark�s Crime in America (1971), and Jessica Mitford�s Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), to name a few.

To a wide and receptive public, these opponents of the prison system argued that prisons simply do not work. Prisons attempted to rehabilitate, but high recidivism rates proved they were failing. Prisons were also cruel and unjust, according to these early opponents � not merely as they were currently administered, but as such: caging people was presented as fundamentally harmful and wrong. Mitford, an English aristocrat and journalist, went further, claiming that prisons are �essentially a reflection of the values, and a codification for the self-interest, and a method of control, of the dominant class in any given society�. Increased public attention focused on the prison system, stoked by highly visible prison rebellions in New York City in 1970 and in Attica in 1971, led to a sense that dramatic change was inevitable. It was now just a question of sorting out the practicalities.

Writing in his 1971 book The Discovery of the Asylum, historian David Rothman optimistically asserted: �We have been gradually escaping from institutional responses and one can foresee the period when incarceration will be used still more rarely than it is today.� In his widely circulated 1973 expos�, The New Red Barn: A Critical Look at the Modern American Prison, William G Nash prescribed as the only appropriate policy response a moratorium on all prison construction. This proposal was broadly considered plausible and seemed to reflect an emergent common sense. In April 1972, a moratorium was endorsed by the board of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a centrist criminal justice thinktank, as well as by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice a year later. The latter commission, operating under the Department of Justice, added a call for the closure of all juvenile prisons, and it explicated the emerging consensus about American prisons: �There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it.�

With such broad public concern, elites wanted to gain firsthand knowledge of the prison system. Lawyers, judges and politicians spent a day or two in prison to get an impression of the conditions. Thoroughly shaken by his experience, Emanuel Margolis, a prominent Connecticut attorney, concluded that prison reform was the wrong answer: prisons had to be abolished. The son of a rabbi, Margolis concluded from his brief prison experience that in incarceration �the total being is involved and affected � his dignity, even his soul�.

Likewise, in 1972, Congressman Stewart McKinney, a Republican from Connecticut, decided to spend 36 hours in a prison to understand what everyone was talking about. As reported by the Associated Press, the congressman �emerged from prison an emotionally strained man�. McKinney concluded that the current prison system is �a big waste of money and human life�. Upon his �release�, he told reporters: �I can�t see consigning any human being to this kind of existence.�

Yet the rate of incarceration today is nearly five times what it was when McKinney emerged from his cell. As political scientist Vesla Weaver has demonstrated, some of the very same politicians who once advocated for segregation switched to advocating for crime policy that would imprison massive numbers of poor people and people of color when it became clear that segregation was a losing cause. Georgia senator Herman Talmadge associated crime, urban uprisings and non-violent civil disobedience, asserting: �Mob violence such as we have witnessed is a direct outgrowth of the philosophy that people can violate any law they deem to be unjust or immoral or with which they don�t agree.� The necessary response: getting tough on crime and building prisons.

In accounting for the rise of what many now call �mass incarceration�, scholars point to race, politics and economics as driving factors. The composite picture has gradually come into focus. The New Jim Crow rightly pushed race and racism center stage, and laid the blame on shapeshifting white supremacy, but more recent work by Michael Javon Fortner and James Forman Jr shows how concern over crime also led black leaders to support the emergent regime of tougher punishments.

Richard Nixon�s war on crime and Ronald Reagan�s war on drugs have long been seen as pernicious forces, but Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton have pinpointed the roots of mass incarceration in Johnson�s Great Society, and Marie Gottschalk has spelled out the thoroughly bipartisan consensus thereafter. Perhaps most fundamentally, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Lo�c Wacquant have shown how economic shifts conjured prisons as a catchall solution. In ways that addressed only symptoms and never causes, prisons solved for unemployment on both sides of the bars: both for the urban underclass that was caged, and for rural white communities that built and managed the cages.

But law-and-order politics also signaled a different kind of cultural reorientation: a shift in American religion. Nowhere was this change more obvious and consequential than in elite political rhetoric. During the civil rights era, politicians on both sides of the aisle would trumpet the ideal of justice, often using religious language to do so. Justice was an ideal; it was up to us to make this divine notion a reality. During the era of mass incarceration, Americans� ambitions for justice have been thoroughly downsized. Justice is now principally a modifier in the �criminal justice system�. Law is principally something to be followed, and its violation (at least by those with little power) is to be punished. Instead of a world where the poor, the weak, and the hungry might be raised up, justice has come to mean little more than the efficient administration of the punitive system we already have. In the moral imagination of mass incarceration, we can imagine greater fairness � for example, in the elimination of racial disparities � but we are generally unable to envision a qualitatively higher justice.

At the same time Doyle was prophesying the end of the prison system, the membership of liberal Protestant denominations, whose leaders and rank-and-file had wielded outsize influence for the duration of the 20th century, steadily declined. Once Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich graced the cover of Time, Newsweek proclaimed 1976 the �year of the evangelical� and Billy Graham became a de facto presidential chaplain. With the formation of the Moral Majority, conservative, politically activated evangelicals rushed the public square. On the left, meanwhile, public religion receded and secularism triumphed. God�s law was no longer an imperative to strengthen society or democracy; instead, religious rhetoric had become a watchword for virulent conservatism, leaving the potent moral language of religion up to the right. Thus for the right, God�s law served as an admonition to limit the power of the state, and for the left, God�s law ceased to have any significance whatsoever.

The economic, political and cultural forces that conspired to generate mass incarceration were perhaps too fierce for 1970s prison abolition to beat back, and prison abolition retreated into the shadows. But in assessing what went wrong last time around, we can�t help but notice that 1970s prison reformers � even religious prison abolitionists � made their appeals in overwhelmingly secular, pragmatic terms. They pushed for the elimination of racial disparities, the amelioration of prison conditions, and the improvement of measurable outcomes. They did not sufficiently appeal to the deep veins of the American moral imagination: the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, the suffragettes, all of whom were deeply religious in their politics.

Those who�ve been turned on to the problem of mass incarceration by The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay�s 13th may not yet realize it, but the organizing metaphors they�ve latched on to do not lend themselves to prison reform; they lend themselves to prison abolition. We will repeat the mistakes of the 1970s unless we emphatically embrace that deeper, broader American moral imagination, one that necessarily taps into our nation�s religious stories, images and rituals.

The problem isn�t merely that we lock too many of our fellow citizens and, increasingly, non-citizens in cages. It�s that locking any human being in a cage is a moral abomination. Those who appeal to slavery and Jim Crow to make sense of mass incarceration are right to identify white supremacy as an abiding American tendency. But another American tradition is that of abolition. As Andrew Delbanco characterized this �recurrent American� impulse in his 2012 book The Abolitionist Imagination, abolitionism �identifies a heinous evil and want to eradicate it � not tomorrow, not next year, but now.� This is the spirit of abolition � and it requires us to think in moral terms, and speak moral language.

When we find our laws enabling barbarism, we must call upon the laws of the gods to abolish them. This cry for divine justice � a justice that rejects state violence, a justice that rolls down like water � is gathering.

We hear it in the testimonies of prison chaplains and educators, and in the exhortations of abolitionists Angela Davis and Mariame Kaba. We hear it in the actions of organizations like Critical Resistance, Black and Pink and The Ordinary People�s Society, whose work prefigures our abolitionist future. And most of all we hear this cry in the brave words and deeds of incarcerated organizers across the nation who demand justice with labor strikes and hunger strikes.

These voices, religious and secular, incarcerated and free, must join together and prophesy justice: a world without prisons, where none is disposable and all are free.

1 comment

No, Mr. President, I Am Not Obstructing Justice

Sunday, 20 May 2018 13:49

Schaaf writes: "There are people like Mendoza-Sanchez in communities across our country: hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding. They are parents, neighbors and caretakers. Their stories may have begun in another country, but - to our blessing and advantage - continue in ours."

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. (photo: Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle)

No, Mr. President, I Am Not Obstructing Justice

By Libby Schaaf, The Washington Post

20 May 18

"As mayor, it�s my duty to protect my residents�especially when our most vulnerable are unjustly attacked."

hen President Trump was admonishing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to charge me with obstruction of justice Wednesday, I was at Harvard University sharing how we intend to give every child from Oakland, Calif., the opportunity to attend college.

Like all cities, Oakland suffers from disparities. Our African American and Latino children finish college at vastly lower rates than whites. That achievement gap is a tragic legacy of our country�s racist history.

I sought elected office to fix that � to build an equitable city where every resident, from every neighborhood and background, has the same opportunity to thrive. I believe in the American promise of �justice for all.�

Mr. President, I am not obstructing justice. I am seeking it.

The president takes issue with a tweet I posted in February in which I notified residents of an impending raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Bay Area, including Oakland. I wanted to make sure that people were prepared, not panicked, and that they understood their legal rights.

I did this for people such as Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico 24?years ago . She learned English, earned a degree and worked as a nurse in the cancer ward of Oakland�s public hospital. She and her husband, Eusebio, raised four children and bought a home.

�It�s supposed to be that if you assimilate to the culture of the country, you pay taxes, you work, you graduate college, you have a better chance,� Mendoza-Sanchez told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Last August, Mendoza-Sanchez and her husband were deported. They were ripped from their U.S.-born children � exiled to a country they had not set foot in for two decades. And they were taken from Oakland, where they had contributed to our community�s collective health, well-being and safety.

Under the Obama administration, Mendoza-Sanchez�s status � with a clean record, a good job and college-bound children � made her and her husband eligible for deferrals as they sought citizenship. But under the Trump administration, undocumented residents are vilified as �dangerous criminals� or, as of last week � simply �animals.� Trump has more than doubled deportations of people without any criminal convictions.

There are people like Mendoza-Sanchez in communities across our country: hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding. They are parents, neighbors and caretakers. Their stories may have begun in another country, but � to our blessing and advantage � continue in ours.

They deserve justice too.

Far from the days when Trump�s Scottish mother gained her naturalization so easily, today�s immigration system is broken. It separates families, endangers our economy that relies on a substantial undocumented workforce and doesn�t provide legal representation to those seeking political asylum.

As mayor, it�s my duty to protect my residents � especially when our most vulnerable are unjustly attacked. As a leader, it�s my duty to call out this administration�s anti-immigrant fearmongering for what it is: a racist lie.

It�s well documented that immigrants � even undocumented immigrants � commit fewer crimes than American-born citizens. And diverse, sanctuary cities such as Oakland are seeing dramatic decreases in crime.

Back at Harvard, I was proud to show how our community has increased the number of college-enrolled, African American students by 14 percent and Latino students by 11 percent in just one year. We�re determined to close the achievement gap one student, one family and one community at a time.

We call our plan the Oakland Promise. It exemplifies America�s promise. Because Oakland doesn�t obstruct justice, we seek it.

9 comments

FOCUS: The Bolton Administration Has Already Begun

Sunday, 20 May 2018 11:59

Feffer writes: "The hard-right national security adviser successfully tanked the Iran deal. His next target? The North Korea talks."

John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)

The Bolton Administration Has Already Begun

By John Feffer, Informed Comment

20 May 18

he hard-right national security adviser successfully tanked the Iran deal. His next target? The North Korea talks.

For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the handle, John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the position of power he now occupies.

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing institutes like the American Enterprise Institute, media appearances on Fox, and the occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for president in 2012 and 2016 but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Bolton eagerly endorsed the candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up as a potential secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn�t get the call. A similarity in temperament and a difference in ideology seemed to doom his appointment. The White House, after all, couldn�t possibly accommodate two filterless hotheads.

Moreover, Bolton�s continued support for the Iraq War and a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds with the new president. �Bolton�s lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there isn�t much in the man�s worldview that rings consonant with President Trump�s �America First� foreign policy,� wrote Daniel DePetris in The American Conservative.

That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump�s national security advisor.

After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As for the differences in ideology, those were largely fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to tailor his message to his audience.

Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign policy, that it�s Bolton�s administration now.

Bolton�s Impact

National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He didn�t have to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn�t have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state.

He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy far to the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put one notch in his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal.

This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear his distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who preferred to remain within the agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The New York Times:

"Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear how much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never convened a high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said, channeling his �America First� vocabulary.

Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more challenging assignments. �By working in the West Wing, the national security adviser spends more time with the president than the secretaries of State or Defense, and so can always get the last word,� writes Jonathan Swan in Axios. �But Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision.�

So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been coy about whether he�s still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In public, of course, he must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the biggest boosters of the militant, cult-like People�s Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump�s ear at every possible opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis are ready to take over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from Israel.

Meanwhile, as the president�s enforcer, it�s Bolton�s job to play the bad cop. He�s already done so with Europe, raising the possibility of sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton must love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral stone.

However, the test of Bolton�s impact shouldn�t be Iran, where his views intersect with Trump�s. The real challenge will be on issues where Bolton�s stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current policy.

From Regime Change to Rapprochement?

John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton continued to argue in the Wall Street Journal that the United States should launch a preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.

The Journal piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S. territory in 1837. (No, I�m not making this up). Bolton didn�t bother to devote any space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea that, unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear weapons and involve the deaths of more than a million people.

It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast � and minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences.

Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong Un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held preferences.

But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the track record of U.S.-North Korean negotiations isn�t very good. He knows that a failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other side of the spectrum � or perhaps, given North Korea�s reaction to the recent U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling.

In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the upcoming summit. He�s ratcheted down expectations by saying that the Trump administration isn�t �starry-eyed� about the meeting. He�s loaded the summit agenda by adding �their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years.� It would be hard enough to negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though North Korea has already released the �American hostages�).

But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his references to Libya. In interviews, he has said that Libya�s denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea talks.

Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then, within a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention, and regime collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried about precisely such a scenario?

An anonymous source in the Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of Vanity Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: �I mean, there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans, and that is to tell them, �Warning: don�t go any further because we are going to screw you�� So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the North Koreans, telling them, �don�t trust us.��

Of course, Bolton�s mere presence in the administration, even if he just stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that this government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that�s the real reason for North Korea�s sudden summit skepticism.

War at the Top?

John Bolton isn�t stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not directly. He�s a sycophant to his superiors and a sunvabitch to his subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his equals. The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising for a mutual bruising. He argues that it�s not hawks versus doves in the Trump administration, but �litigators versus planners.�

"The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national security policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of international commitments and demonstrate American power before moving on to the next target.

Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after � for instance, how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

It�s not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus whether he�ll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor�s blow-�em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.

I�m not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then eventually, because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of power.

But on the general direction of Trump�s foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing their opposition. But it didn�t fool either Bolton or Pompeo.

Let�s be clear: There is no American �retreat� from the world. Under the rubric of �America First,� the Trump administration has created a new kind of multilateral engagement � aligned with the hard right in Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: �Gott im Himmel, we must oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)

So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this way, not that. As the Washington Examiner recently editorialized, �Trump�s foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role as global leader � even if we�re leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry.�

But please, let�s not talk about Trump�s �foreign policy record.� This is not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News, and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego and bank account.

No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before he blows it up, we�re just living in it.

8 comments

FOCUS: Ripping Children From Parents Will Shatter America's Soul

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48262"><span class="small">Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Washington Post</span></a>

Sunday, 20 May 2018 10:37

Nguyen writes: "Sessions is a law-and-order man who believes he is protecting our country. I'm a man, a son, a father and a writer who worries about our nation losing its soul."

A one-year-old from El Salvador clings to his mother after she turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents on Dec. 7, 2015 near Rio Grande City, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

Ripping Children From Parents Will Shatter America's Soul

By Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Washington Post

20 May 18

hen I was 4 years old, I was taken away from my parents. We were refugees from Vietnam, fleeing the end of the war in 1975. With 130,000 other Vietnamese, we were put into refugee camps. To leave, we needed American sponsors, but no sponsor was willing to host my entire family. One took my parents, one took my 10-year-old brother and one took me. Memory for me begins here, howling with fear and pain as I was taken from my mother, too young to understand that I would be returned to her in a few months.

I thought of this experience when I read the words earlier this month of Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding his intent to separate children from undocumented parents at the border � possibly even sending those children to detention camps on military bases. �If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,� he said. �If you don�t like that, then don�t smuggle children over our border.�

Sessions is a law-and-order man who believes he is protecting our country. I�m a man, a son, a father and a writer who worries about our nation losing its soul.

The intent of this policy is punitive. In practice, it will undoubtedly lead to shattered families. As Democratic Texas Senate candidate Beto O�Rourke says, �You are either for separating children from their parents or you are against it. I am against it.� Me too.

The controversy over this policy should not be reduced to a partisan issue, or even to a debate about undocumented immigration. Sessions�s child-removal policy actually extends the callousness of current American penal practices. As Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said, �That�s no different than what we do every day in every part of the United States � when an adult of a family commits a crime. .?.?. If you as a parent break into a house, you will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family.�

Nielsen inadvertently points to how removing children from their parents has been a longtime bipartisan practice of American society. Democrats and liberals who condemn contemporary Republican policy might want to consider how the Clinton and Obama administrations also sanctioned the removal of children from parents, both undocumented immigrants and those in prison for other crimes.

The war on drugs, tough-on-crime sentencing and mandatory minimum sentencing � all of which featured prominently in the Clinton administration � have led to rates of mass incarceration in the United States that are almost unrivaled worldwide. More than 2.3?million Americans are in some type of correctional facility. If they have children, they have been separated from them, and the chances of them losing their children to the state are high. More than 5 million children in the United States have had a parent in jail, and the impact is disproportionately high for black and Latino children.

As a nation, we have had little significant debate on the morality or efficacy of such policies. Perhaps this is because the removal of children from parents is not new in U.S. history. Indigenous children were sent alone to Indian schools to become assimilated into American society, and slaveowners separated slave children from slave parents to sell either, or both.

Comparing them to undocumented families today may anger many contemporary Americans. Like Sessions and Nielsen, they would argue that undocumented immigrants have broken the law, and that the law allows these removals.

It was legal for slaveowners to sell slave children, too. But was the practice just? Was it humane?

Hiding behind the law is so persuasive that it can lead those who have benefited from humane policies to endorse inhumane ones. Take some of my fellow Vietnamese immigrants, for example � such as Tri Ta, mayor of Westminster, Calif., which has more Vietnamese Americans per capita than any other U.S. city. Mayor Ta, along with the city�s Vietnamese American vice mayor, Tyler Diep, voted for a successful Westminster resolution against California�s sanctuary state stance, which protects undocumented immigrants.

�The Vietnamese boat people came to the United States legally,� Ta said. �My family and I went through the process.�

Vietnamese people came to this country not only because it was legal but because it was humane. Congress decided that the United States owed a moral debt to the South Vietnamese, who had fought a war that was largely driven by U.S. interests. Would Ta be so willing to endorse legality if the United States had not welcomed the Vietnamese?

My removal from my parents was a benevolent act that led me to being housed for several months by a generous American family. And yet being separated from my parents hurt enough for me to remember it vividly more than 40?years later. I can easily imagine the kind of damage a prolonged removal, under much more adverse circumstances, would do to a child. Or to a parent, since I am now the father of a 4-year-old myself. I say I can imagine it, but the pain of losing my son is actually unimaginable.

I wonder whether whoever decided to take me from my mother considered her pain. Maybe they only saw her alienness and her lack of education, which happened because she was born poor and a girl. Perhaps they never saw that in Vietnam she had been a successful businesswoman. But even if she hadn�t, what difference should that have made? Are people who are less successful not human or deserving of the right to hold on to their children? Our answer to that question says everything about us.

14 comments

Again I Am Speaking Out Against Torture, Again I Am Under Attack

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>

Sunday, 20 May 2018 08:33

Kiriakou writes: "Almost nobody in America has been as vocal in opposition to the Haspel nomination as I have. I've been a thorn in the CIA's butt for a long time. And certainly this is one of the things that the CIA does. When they don't like the message, they attack the messenger."

John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)

Again I Am Speaking Out Against Torture, Again I Am Under Attack

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

20 May 18

ost of you probably know that I was a former CIA officer, that I blew the whistle on the CIA�s torture program, and that I spent 23 months in a federal prison for my troubles. I�ve never second-guessed myself. I know I did the right thing, even if the cost was high. I lost my federal pension, my job, my security clearance, my life�s savings, even my wife. Still, I would do it over again.

In the interim, I�ve become something of a �spokesman� on the issues of torture and human rights. And I�m frequently sought out by media outlets in the U.S. and abroad. As you might imagine, President Trump�s nomination of Gina Haspel supercharged those media requests. The first one after the nomination was made public was from the Washington Post. They asked me to write an op-ed for the Sunday edition. It got more than 2.8 million hits. They also recorded a 30-minute video to promote the piece online. That was followed by three columns about Haspel at Reader Supported News, two appearances on Democracy Now, a panel at CNN, NPR, and dozens of other radio shows. I was very public in my opposition to Gina Haspel. I believe that her deep involvement in the CIA�s torture program is disqualifying, no matter how many of the CIA�s rank-and-file employees love her, as Senator Mark Warner said in rationalizing his flip-flop on her nomination.

In the midst of all of these interviews, I received a call from freelance journalist Caroline Lester, who said she was writing a story about me for The New Republic, and she asked for an interview. I demurred, saying that I was tired of being the �story.� The real news here was Gina Haspel, what she did, what she stands for, and why she shouldn�t be the CIA director. Lester was persistent. She said that she had her assignment, the article was going to be written, and I could either cooperate or not. I know a hit piece when I see one, but I agreed to meet with her, if only to take the edge off of what I thought would be a negative portrayal of me, even if it was in the fake-progressive, neo-liberal New Republic.

I was right, of course. The article�s headline blared, �The CIA Spy Who Became a Russian Propagandist.� It was exactly what I had expected.

As I mentioned above, one of the costs of whistleblowing is financial ruin. A major national security whistleblower once told me that he�s been broke since for 45 years. He never recovered financially after blowing the whistle on government illegality.

I was similarly broke until last August, when I received a call from the Sputnik News Network, a Russian government-owned outlet in Washington, with an offer of a two-hour daily radio show. I told the general manager that I would only take the job if I had complete editorial freedom to talk about and to criticize anything and anyone I wanted, including Vladimir Putin. He agreed without hesitation. When I asked if he would put it in writing, he did so immediately. I�ve been co-host of the show Loud & Clear since September 2017.

The journalist challenged me only once during our conversation. How could I work for a Russian propaganda outlet? I told her that she obviously had never listened to the show. Besides, I said, �Are you going to put food on my table? Are you going to put my kids through college? Nobody else is beating a path to my door to offer me work.� I thought we had left it at that.

The article was published a few weeks later and, just as I had expected, was a hit piece. I didn�t think it was a big deal, though. Nobody reads The New Republic anyway. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the CIA had put The New Republic up to it.

Almost nobody in America has been as vocal in opposition to the Haspel nomination as I have. I�ve been a thorn in the CIA�s butt for a long time. And certainly this is one of the things that the CIA does. When they don�t like the message, they attack the messenger. When former CIA chief interrogator Glenn Carle published a memoir saying that the torture program was immoral, unethical, and illegal, the CIA put out the word that nobody should review the book. Almost nobody did and sales flopped. The same thing happened when NSA whistleblower Tom Drake published his book and when Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack published hers. The message is meant to discredit and silence the messenger.

That brings me back to The New Republic. They approached Caroline Lester with the story. They commissioned it. So who is Caroline Lester? I have no idea. If you click on her name on the New Republic website, this is her only article. Even a google search doesn�t tell you much. She has a website showing that she�s a freelancer and podcaster, and the site proudly features her articles in such outlets as the Yale University alumni magazine, a publication called �Roads & Kingdoms,� and a magazine called �Off Assignment.� Is she in the pay of the CIA? I don�t know. Maybe she is. Is The New Republic doing the CIA�s dirty work? I believe it is.

The purpose of this column is not to bash Caroline Lester or The New Republic. They�re not important enough to bash. The purpose is to tell the CIA that we know what they�re doing. It�s petty. It�s sad. But it�s also motivating. My whistleblower colleagues and I will keep up the fight.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration�s torture program.

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.

26 comments

More Articles...

<< Start < Prev 1241 1242 1243 1244 1245 1246 1247 1248 1249 1250 Next > End >>

Page 1248 of 3432

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

Name:	*
Username:	*
E-mail:	*
Password:	*
Confirm password:	*
Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are required.