The War On Drugs is Responsible For The Current American Jim Crow Situation

The war on drugs as waged in the USA for the past 35 years is directly responsible for the misery and mass incarceration of multiple millions of Blacks and Latinos in the US. Enormous numbers of young black men are swept up in raids, deprived of all Fourth Amendment rights, arrested, forced to plea-bargain, and are convicted of felonies and thus lose nearly all their civil rights and any chance to go to college and get a good job — for doing the exact same things that young white fellows do, with impunity, every single day, AT IDENTICAL RATES — smoking or selling marijuana, harming no one.

Drunk drivers DO kill people — lots of them. But what do we do with alcoholics who endanger other people’s lives? They might go to jail for a month or so, lose their drivers’ permits for a while, and are given treatment and training to quit their truly dangerous addiction. Their friends and relations are encouraged to take the car keys away. A drunk driver who actually kills people, like the two WV assholes who killed my oldest brother with a car in 1968, seem to serve a few months or years of jail time. Judges and juries have huge amounts of discretion and can sentence guilty parties to anywhere from 0 to 30 years, if they want. Alcohol kills about 75,000 people per year according to the CDC, and tobacco is even more deadly. Both drugs are, obviously, legal.

If it’s a white kid dealing a bit of weed or coke in his/her dorm or apartment or parent’s country club or in a trendy (ie expensive) night club, chances he/she will be swept up in a police or SWAT raid and be locked up or otherwise involved in the criminal INjustice system are close to zero. Today, in many states, he or she can even buy legal weed as medical marijuana once they come up with the cash to go thru the appropriate bureaucratic hurdles.

Nurses and doctors have notoriously high addiction rates to prescription narcotics — as do many celebrities (e.g. Rush Limbaugh). Of course these medicos and celebs do not face life in prison or on parole. They will not be made to spread-eagle over the hood of their car, or be strip-searched when they are arrested, etc etc, even though those painkillers are extremely dangerous and kill tens of thousands every year even when prescribed and used as directed. Their cars, offices, medical equipment and houses are not going to be confiscated. They will not immediately lose the right to practice their profession — or to do any job at all –forever. They will not be subjected to rigid mandatory minimum sentences under a “one strike and you’re out” law. Their kids will not be taken away and placed in foster homes. No, if by chance they are found to be showing obvious signs if addiction and erratic behavior that really does endanger others, they are given treatment. Fine, that’s the right way to treat them.

But if you are black and live in the ghetto, you are in fact much less likely to be a drug user, but are at an insanely higher risk of getting caught if you do. The vast majority of those drug sweeps and random stop-and-frisks retrieve nothing at all. But eventually, the arrests pile up, so much so that in many cities, 3/4 of all black men are felons or otherwise under the control of the criminal INjustice system. And of course, if you look at data supplied by Jocelyn Elders and the CDC, no-one has ever died from an overdose of cannabis. The only forms of marijuana that are directly capable of killing people appear to be hemp ropes and canvas (guess where the word ‘canvas’ comes from?) although if you drive while high you can certainly kill someone.

I am inspired to write this post because I’m reading the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Please go out and buy or borrow a copy and ACT on what you learn therein. She makes the case very clearly that the War on Drugs has been directly responsible for the devastation we currently see in the Black community in America. We need to have compassion for its victims, and we need to act.

I would like to issue a call to grant a full and complete pardon to every single person who has been convicted of any felony drug charge involving the use or possession of any drug at all. Or even for the sale of small amounts — especially of marijuana which, as I indicated earlier, is not only harmless but has been shown to be beneficial for a number of medical conditions. We need to bring back the Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search and seizure. We need to stop putting black men behind bars and destroying their lives for doing the exact same thing that many other people do — and who never suffer any consequences at all. Marijuana should be completely legalized, so that anybody can grow as much as they want and sell it to anyone. (Tax revenues would help many state and local governments.) Folks who are addicted to other drugs, which are not nearly as harmless (and many of which actually do kill lots of people) should be treated with love and compassion and treated so that they can return to their families and their loved ones. Let’s close down the prisons that are eating up funds that ought to be used to educate and treat people. If we are going to lock people up for a long time and seize their properties, let it be the white collar criminals on Wall Street and companies like Enron who stole Billions of dollars, if not Trillions. Let’s take away their ill-gotten loot, and use it to reimburse the poor folks who had all of their property seized, their civil rights revoked, and who were locked up and made into felons forever, ruining not only their own lives but those of their entire families.

It’s time for reparations.

[ps: I wrote my first draft of this column on a Nook. Bad idea. The “keyboard” is useless, the interface frustrating, and it’s virtually impossible to correct spelling errors. I really do know how to spell fairly well. But between my old finger injury {table saw} and the crappy electronics, if you read the first version, you probably thought I was a blithering idiot like that other drug addict Rush Limbaugh. Speaking of whom, if he gets to keep his millions after being found abusing painkillers, and isn’t labeled a felon for the rest of his life, and serves no jail time whatsoever, then what about all the black guys and gals in prison or on parole for doing the exact same thing, only less?]

Police, Discipline, and Zero Tolerance in Urban Classrooms

Have you ever thought about whether police in school hallways is a good idea or not?

I strongly recommend this review by James Boutin , a former DCPS teacher, about a book on just this topic. I won’t pretend that I handled interactions regarding student discipline well in every case. But things are getting even worse these days in the poorer schools with browner student populations. Teachers find that they lose their authority to police officers and security guards, and that incidents that used to be handled inside the school system now become judicial matters; as a result, many kids end up with a criminal record for defying authority in the only way that they know how to do it. For example: wearing hats inside the building.

A quote from James’ review:

Consider a brief example (Police in the Hallways provides many more). Nolan notes that students identify their apparel as fundamental to their self-expression of identity. (One student compares the DOE requirement that no hats be worn in school to requiring adults to walk around with no shoes.) Those who disobey this policy (one that Nolan feels has little reasoning to justify it) by wearing hats are simultaneously engaging in an act of self-expression AND opposition to institutional rules they view as illegitimate. Furthermore, by refusing to remove one’s hat for a teacher or security agent, students potentially gain favor with peers for proving that they’re not “a punk” AND continuing to resist illegitimate authority. Thus students can carve out a modicum of control in an institution that constantly attempts to deprive them of it.

Highly punitive zero tolerance policies and students’ reactions to them have had the effect of repositioning some schools as institutions of control rather than learning, and the impact is disproportionately harmful for poor and minority school children. Nolan writes, “It is a moral outrage that we would take such punitive stand in matters of urban school discipline when so little is offered to urban schools.” Rather than relying on increasingly harsh consequences as our only recourse for students in schools who don’t conform to our expectations, Nolan calls for a reevaluation both of the policies we impose on low-income schools and also of our responses when students and communities resist them. Importantly, such a reevaluation must be done in light of a nuanced and holistic understanding of the challenges people living in urban poverty in the United States in the early 21st century are facing – e.g. lack of available legal employment, the influence of drugs and gangs, and the highly transient nature of families who live there.

It reminds me of two other books that I am also reading: Slavery By Another Name, and The New Jim Crow. More on those later, but I strongly recommend both of those books, too.

What I’m Reading These Days

Both my brother and I recently had major surgery (him: back/nerves/sciatica. me: intestinal/crohn’s disease) and are both suffering from insomnia, which we’ve never really had before. Perhaps the pain medications had something to do with it, but who knows?

In any case, it gives me an excuse to do a bit of home improvement (quietly, so as to not wake my wife) and a lot of reading.  I’m not usually in the habit of reading supermarket or drug store pulp fiction (tho I did enjoy the book Stephen King wrote about the time some disease killed 99.999% of the human race: what would it be like to survive in such a world? Strange, for sure, and SK does a lot of realistic conjecturing [as well as some unrealistic ghostly imagining, of course] and has a really keen ear for the way Americans of different types really do talk. But I read that years ago.)

 A few of the things I’m in the middle of reading, much of it on a Nook e-reader (which has both advantages and disadvantages btw)

* selections of works of Mark Twain (most recently, Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, his critiques of James Fenimore Cooper, and his take on the French Revolution and the Ancien Regime; his take on racism and imperialism, both American and Belgian)

* Last of the Mohicans by JFC. I’ll admit I skimmed a lot of it since his writing is so execrable. One could say in a simple declarative sentence of 2 or 3 lines, tops, what JFC will use 2 or 3 paragraphs for, using language perhaps nobody ever used. I wanted to see how it corresponded with the movie, which i enjoyed a lot. Did you know that Natty Bumppo refers to himself, repeatedly, as “a man without a cross”? And do you know what he meant? I had to look it up, and now you can. I will say the writing is better here than in Deerslayer, which IIRC is bout the american revolutionary war.

* Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich by William L Shirer. Excellent, except he makes lots and lots of excuses for the supposedly anti-nazi German officer corps who actually created Hitler and his party, funded them, armed them, trained their assault forces, and so on. But he does an excellent job at showing how Hitler was a master of the well-placed and perfectly-timed lie, betrayal and murder, allowing him to ally with certain forces only to betray them soon enough, when it suited his purposes. Hitler was, in this sense, one of the largest gangsters ever to live — but one who was able to recruit to his side, or else neutralize, millions of Germans who had fought hard against him for decades. That is one of my biggest unanswered questions: Hitler did not murder the literally tens of millions of Germans who had been members of the German Communist and Socialist parties before he declared those parties illegal. Yet essentially none of them, when drafted into the german military, did anything whatsoever to sabotage his obviously illegal, racist, murdering, and unprovoked wars and attacks. Why did they not revolt?

* Mein Kampf — am only a few chapters in. A bit heavy going because you know that nearly every sentence is a lie; hard to tease out the bits of truth and exactly what he is omitting. Seems surprisingly well-organized book so far. A lot of Shirer comes directly from this book; hard to find too many sources who actually knew Hitler when he was a young bum and who were willing to talk. Generally, I come more and more to appreciate what an utter ASSHOLE Hitler was. I share absolutely none of his basic opinions. I certainly hope that if I had been born in Germany during the first few decades of the 20th century, I would have been an anti-fascist.

* For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, which I had never read, only other works like Old Man and the Sea, Sun Also Rises, and some stories on bullfighting in Spain. FWTBT is about some left-wing Spanish guerrilla fighters behind enemy (i.e., fascist) lines during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which occurred when right-wing Spanish military officers, supported strongly by the Spanish and international Catholic Church, rose up and overthrew a legitimately elected national government, but were not immediately successful. It took three long years of war for the Nationalists, as the fascists were also called, to conquer all of Spain and to wipe out all of the opposition. Hemingway’s book gives an almost moment-to-moment, blow-by-blow account of what it was like to be part of a group of undercover fighters, surrounded by the enemy forces, who have been given the assignment of destroying a particular bridge in the mountains at the precise moment when the Loyalist (anti-fascist) government forces begin a major offensive to relieve the Fascist attacks on Madrid, which was still in anti-fascist, legitimate government hands. I was inspired to read this by watching part of Gellhorn and Hemingway. I liked the book a lot. I see there is a movie version with Gary Cooper; wonder how that will be.

* Cryptonomicon — excellent! A very long novel by Neal Stephenson that involves crypto during World War 2, with specific emphasis on Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, the bombe, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the Pacific Theater (esp the fight in the horrible jungles of New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, and the Philippines) as well as a bunch of modern-day computer geeks and math freaks who are trying to set up some sort of new information network in the Far East in the present-day (more or less)

* Origin of Species by Darwin. Man, this is an excellent book! I’m only about half way through. Neither he nor anybody else knew anything about genetics as we understand the topic today, with DNA, RNA, chromosomes, genes and so on; but he does an excellent job of pointing out what he admitted were gaps in the current state of knowledge of biology and zoology that nonetheless led him to his theory, which I think I can summarize thusly:

>> every creature (animal, plant, bacteria, virus, etc) tries to make copies of itself and stuggles to survive and not to be eaten

>> that drive to reproduce produces so many offspring that if all of them were to survive, then any one species would in a surprisingly small number of generations produce so many descendants that they would cover the entire planet, which is clearly impossible and never happens

>> these descendants, while similar to each other, do vary somewhat. Some of those variations make it so that their possessors are slightly more likely to survive and pass along descendants than their peers do

>>we know that these variations do pass along; in fact, farmers and breeders and completely uncivilized peoples with only the beginnings of agriculture or animal husbandry have been using this principle unwittingly for a long time. For instance, they only allow the strongest or meatiest or most docile rams or bulls or vegetables produce descendants, and have been “improving” (or at least modifying in the way that those people preferred)  those species as they prefer for millennia; this is called “artificial selection”

>> what nature does is very similar and is called ‘natural selection’

>>one big problem remains: precisely how does one decide if two types of animals or plants or yeasts or bacteria are in fact different species or are merely varieties/races/strains of the same species? In many cases, different species cannot produce offspring at all, no matter how hard they try. In other cases (like horses and donkeys) they can indeed produce offspring, i.e. mules or hinneys, but these descendants are sterile and can’t have any offspring whatsoever. Whereas if two different varieties of the same species are crossed, often times they and their descendants have ‘hybrid vigor’ but are quite different from either of their parents.

>>In any case, he assumes that the world is unimaginably ancient, and that evolution (descent by modification and natural selection causing gradual changes in species, such that the vast majority of all species that have ever existed are now extinct) takes a long, long time; but since the world is ancient, that time has indeed been sufficient for lots and lots of change. All you have to do, to see how much change has occurred, is to walk along the beach at Lyme Regis…

* Astrographs, Telescopes, and Eyepieces by Richard Berry et al (published by Willmann-Bell, willbell.com) Excellent technical account of the design and probable outcome of optics of all common, and many uncommon, types of telescopes and their associated eyepieces. The only drawback is that they have very little analysis of how these optical devices actually perform in real life, in the field or in an observatory; nor does it give you much of an idea of how critical the manufacturing tolerances are if you choose to make one of these items yourself. (That’s what I do for fun!) I have discovered that with a regular Newtonian telescope, you can make all sorts of errors and be really sloppy in your tolerances, but your scope will still work great. It only has two mirrors, a large one that is supposed to be a paraboloid and a much smaller one that is supposed to be optically flat. Even if your supposedly-paraboloidal mirror is really closer to a section of a sphere, or shaped more like an ellipsoid or a hyperbolid, or has lots of scratches, or isn’t really any one of those precise shapes, if your focal length is long enough, you will still see way more stuff, more clearly, in the sky, then you would with your naked eyes or even a small refractor or pair of binoculars. Whereas, if you make errors in spacing, focal lengths, or radii of curvature in a multi-element telescope like a Lurie-Houghton catadioptric scope, then it won’t work at all. Images will be horribly distorted. Been there, done that, and that’s even though everything looked to me to be, individually, AFAICT closer to perfection as it had any reason to be. Many years of work down the drain, and I am still drawing a blank on what do I do now to fix it? I haven’t a clue as to where to begin. What if the glass was not what we thought it was?

A Cartoon On Charter Schools and the G.E.R.M.

Instead of attempting to reproduce the entire cartoon here, let me give you the URL so you can look at it.

The art isn’t perfect, but it does lay out the issues behind NCLB, RTTT, charter schools, TFA, and so on.

Click here to see it.

Just where does all the money go in ‘financially troubled’ school districts?

If you live in DC or Philadelphia, a huge chunk of the school system’s budget goes to consultants. I submit that just like with the banking and insurance industries, the huge sums paid to the top school officers and to their friends consultants is a large part of the reason why many school systems are approaching bankruptcy.

For example, in Philadelphia, one such firm, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), is earning an enormous bundle: it ALONE earned nearly $12 million from the Philly school district. (Just the initials BCG make one suspect the company is involved with giving the kids in Philadelphia a horrible case of tuberculosis. I don’t think they are curing anybody!)

Think I’m exaggerating? No.

(except for the bitter jest about TB.)

To quote from an article in Education week,

“At the moment, Boston Consulting Group has a limited presence in the district; funds to support the firm’s $230,000 per week price tag ran out June 11.”

If you multiply this $230,000 per week ‘price tag’ times 52 weeks in a year, you should get $11,960,000, which is essentially twelve million dollars. It’s kind of sad that all these high-powered ex-TFA whiz kids come to office claiming they can fix everything — but they turn around and hire consultants to tell them what to do — because, you see, they soon realize they don’t know squat about running schools. This company, as the article shows, have been acting as a shadow management in Philly for some years. For 4 years, the BCG  fees add up to almost $50 million — for ONE consulting firm! And there are undoubtedly many other firms, even if they don’t all charge as much as this one does.

No wonder the Philadelphia public schools are going to go into debt!

You can read some of my own prior posts on the costs of consultants in Washington, DC public schools. Or just do a search for “consultants” in the little search window in the upper right-hand corner of this window. What I found is that during the ’09-’10 school year, the District of Columbia spent, on the average, 40% of their total purchases on what appeared to me to be consulting fees. Only about 34% of the contracted purchases were for things that were probably school-related, such as textbooks, desks, school-related supplies, and computers. [And of those latter purchases, we don’t know how much actually went out into the classrooms for student use, and how much stayed in administrative offices!] Here is my original table: read it and weep.

An honest-to-goodness suit by a teacher against Michelle Rhee et al

Here is an article about the lawsuit, which apparently was filed in 2007/8.

The first few paragraphs:

A special education teacher who says he was fired for blowing the whistle on his school’s practice of tampering with test scores survived the city’s motion to dismiss.

Bruno Mpoy sued the District of Columbia for allegedly firing him from his position at Ludlow Elementary School after he reported to former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee that his principal “instructed teachers [there], including [plaintiff], to change and falsify student records, to alter test scores on standardized assessments, and to fabricate levels of student achievement.”

Mpoy also sued Rhee, former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and The New Teacher Project, which the educator claims cut off his tuition assistance when he lost his job.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled that nearly all of Mpoy’s claims survived the motion to dismiss, with the exception being his claim against The New Teacher Project.

Was JFK such a wonderful president?

I used to idolize Jack Kennedy. I recall spending all night standing in long, long lines that wound their somber ways around half of Capitol Hill, waiting to pass by his coffin and pay my respects, after his assassination. I was 13 and in junior high school; dawn’s early light was beginning to show when we left after viewing the funeral bier.

A bit later, I remember reading some mild criticism of the Kennedy family during the 1960s and being appalled.

Still later, as I moved to the left during the Vietnam War, I realized that JFK had played a major role in continuing to escalate that unjustified, colonial, and, yes, imperialist war. Reading Sy Hersch’s “The Dark Side of Camelot” indicated that — if Hersch was right (and there were those who cast doubt on some of his claims) —  JFK was a serious sex addict.

A more recent article in the Atlantic indicates that Hersch was essentially right. JFK was not only an exploitive sleazeball as far as women were concerned, he was an incredibly reckless sleazeball. I mean, trying to invade Cuba for the crime of throwing out the Mob-corrupted Batista regime and adhering to socialism and communism? Threatening to blow up the whole world over that? Having the same mistress as one of the heads of the Mafia? Just think of the opportunities for blackmail if someone had wanted to do so. And supposedly only homosexuals were liable to get into compromising situations like that. (Of course, just about all of our presidents have had mistresses and so on, while proclaiming their love for monogamy; but for quantity, JFK seems to have beat them all.)

You can read the Atlantic  article about Jackie Bovier Kennedy Onassis, and its ramifications to JFK,  here. 

I’m also reading the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. She points out that there was no real reason for the ‘War on Drugs’ other than providing an excuse for harrassing, arresting, stigmatizing, and excluding black males. There was no epidemic of drugs when it was begun under Reagan, or under Bush 1. Funny that the crack epidemic had origins similar to the heroin epidemic of the 1960s: deliberate and successful attempts at squashing a movement and attacking African-Americans. I recommend reading also The Politics of Heroin. Alexander points out that Clinton vastly expanded the imprisonment of blacks during the War on Drugs.

Thing is, most of the arrests and convictions and withdrawal of all civil rights are for marijuana — a drug which has never by itself caused a single fatality. Unlike alcohol, tobacco or any of the painkillers we take when we suffer serious injuries or are undergoing surgery. People who get addicted to those painkillers and things like methamphetamine need medical and psychological help, not incarceration and removal of all of their civil rights. They can’t live in rent-assisted or public housing; can’t collect welfare, can’t vote, can’t take out student loans or apply for post-secondary grants, and, most likely, can’t get a job unless they lie on their application — and when they are found out, are likely to be jailed again. I mean, where are they supposed to live?

And it’s all so racist. None of those horrible things happen to white folks who do lines of cocaine or smoke a little weed – or lots of it. Did Rush Limbaugh get put away for five consecutive 30-year sentences, as would have occurred had a black man been caught doing what he did with all that oxycodone? Of course not. Do they use helicopters and SWAT teams to shine lights into the windows, and break down the doors of country clubs, where kids who just won a soccer or lacrosse game light up or snort their joy in victory? Of course not.

Actually, I say, legalize all the recreational drugs, and provide real medical help and psychological assistance if they get addicted to the ‘hard’ stuff like meth, coke, oxycodone, opium, or heroin. Give them other drugs that will weaken their addictive urges so they can wean themselves. Stop destroying people’s lives here in the US, south of the border in Mexico, and so on. Stop treating every Black male as a criminal. Eliminate the whole “stop and frisk” business. Bring back our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Alexander points out that as a nation, instead of spending money to help the poor in general, and African-American poor in particular, we spend vast sums of money locking them up. What’s more, police departments not only get lots of military-grade weaponry for free, they are bribed by the Federal government to go along with these police-state tactics, and they get to keep about 80% of the money and valuables that they seize.

Some democracy. It really is as bad as Jim Crow — and if you don’t know how bad that was, then read Slavery by Another Name.

We have had the worst presidents that money can buy — Republican, Democratic, doesn’t really matter.