UW-Milwaukee Study: One in Eight Wisconsin Black Men Incarcerated Between Ages, 18-64

The American Leviathan

Blacks, when you go to prison, your lives deserve to be a "living hell," said Tommy Thompson during his gubernatorial runs. Tommy used racially coded language that fit nicely into Wisconsin's conception of the most segregated urban area in America—Milwaukee. We got to stick it to those guys! We did. It worked well, and continues today.

Those blacks have no one to blame but themselves of course, the Republicans and Tea Partiers assure us.

Racism is pretended to be some long-gone ugliness even as the Republicans and Tea Parties directly appeal to racism every election.

Segregation, that's not racism.

Poverty, that's not racism.

The war on blacks' voting, that's not racism either.

And incarceration rates in the putative American society, the "leviathan unmatched in human history," pay no mind to race.

Wisconsin is Number One in black
incarceration rates.

Michael M. O'Hear has a piece up, Wisconsin #1 in Black Incarceration; How Did We Get Here?

Writes O'Hear:

A new report from the UWM Employment and Training Institute shows that Wisconsin leads the nation in incarcerating black males. Based on data from the 2010 U.S. census, Wisconsin incarcerates about one in every eight of its black men between the ages of 18 and 64. This includes individuals held in state and local correctional facilities. The Badger State’s black incarceration rate is, in fact, about one-third higher than that of the second-place state, Oklahoma, and nearly double the national average.

The UWM Employment and Training Institute (prepared by John Pawasarat and Lois M. Quinn) should be read in its entirety by the entire Wisconsin Republican legislative caucus.

I don't believe it will. The GOP are not big readers. They outsource that kind of thing.

From the study:

Among the most critical workforce issues facing Wisconsin are governmental policies and practices leading to mass incarceration of African Americans men and suspensions of driving privileges to low-income adults. [Note: See why the GOP wants only GOP-prescribed voter IDs as a constitutional qualification for voting in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin SC upholding the Voter ID law is likely too naked a corrupt power grab. We'll see.] The prison population in Wisconsin has more than tripled since 1990, fueled by increased government funding for drug enforcement (rather than treatment) and prison construction, three-strike rules, mandatory minimum sentence laws, truth-in-sentencing replacing judicial discretion in setting punishments, concentrated policing in minority communities, and state incarceration for minor probation and supervision violations. Particularly impacted were African American males, with the 2010 U.S. Census showing Wisconsin having the highest black male incarceration rate in the nation. In Milwaukee County over half of African American men in their 30s have served time in state prison.

Doyle on Right Track on Early Release

Update: Wisconsin budget: Prisoner proposal defended

"They hate us for our freedom," George W. Bush used to bellow, except for that one-in-100 people in jail thing.

Gov. Jim Doyle is calling for a cost-effective and sensible initiative in his state budget that would cut the sentences of non-violent and low-risk Wisconsin inmates, a modest proposal that is bound to draw Republican howls. (see Mark Pitsch, WSJ)

Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau is calling the proposal "alarming".

Writes Adam Liptak in a NYT piece last year:

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. ... (T)he United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Gov. Doyle should be commended for this first step towards sanity in finding alternatives to the jailing of our fellow citizens.

Let's hope state policy follows the direction that Doyle has set and not the direction of increased criminalization and bashing of civil rights that Dane County Exec Kathleen Falk is proposing in her War on Drinking Culture.

Britain and America Leading the World in Jailing Their Populations

One can read Glenn C. Loury in The Boston Review analysing the increasingly putative nature of the American criminal justice system.

Britain has the same problem.

Nigel Morris has a piece in The Independent: As the Government plans to build more jails, the shocking state of crime and punishment in Britain is revealed.

America and Britain leading the world in putting its' populations behind bars; something is wrong with this picture.

Writes Morris:

The Government was accused yesterday of trying to build its way out of the prisons overcrowding crisis as it outlined its vision for the construction of three supersize jails which would bring the number of offenders behind bars to almost 100,000.

Despite stark reminders from penal reform experts that more people are already locked up in England and Wales than anywhere else in western Europe, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, said he was pressing ahead.

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Wrongfully Jailed Face Apathetic Gov and Long Road to Normalcy

Taking away more peoples' liberties than any other country speaks clearly about the putative aspect of the political-legal American culture.

Politically ambitious or corrupt prosecutors scoff at the notion of prosecutorial discretion.

Unfortunately, for those proven innocent after spending years in prison, the road to a comfortable, normal life is elusive.

The New York Times has two excellent piece this morning reporting on the issue of 100s of innocents robbed of their liberty by unscrupulous prosecutors.

by JANET ROBERTS and ELIZABETH STANTON

Christopher Ochoa (an innocent man convicted of murder, and who served 12 years before being proved innocent, freed through the work of the Wisconsin Innocence Project) graduated from law school five years out of prison and started his own practice in Madison, Wis. He has a girlfriend and is looking to buy a house. ...

The men are among the more than 200 prisoners exonerated since 1989 by DNA evidence — almost all of whom had been incarcerated for murder or rape. Their varied experiences are typical of what The New York Times found in one of the most extensive looks to date at what happens to those exonerated inmates after they leave prison.

The Times worked from a list of DNA-exonerated prisoners kept by the Innocence Project — widely regarded as the most thorough record of DNA exonerations. The Times then gathered extensive information on 137 of those whose convictions had been overturned, interviewing 115.
The findings show that most of them have struggled to keep jobs, pay for health care, rebuild family ties and shed the psychological effects of years of questionable or wrongful imprisonment.

Prosecutors issued no apologies for the inflicted harm on the innocent. It's difficult to shame the shameless.

See also FERNANDA SANTOS's Vindicated by DNA, but a Lost Man on the Outside.

As a boy, Jeffrey Mark Deskovic could swim the length of a pool underwater without coming up for air. On sultry days at the Elmira state prison, where he spent most of his 16 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit, Mr. Deskovic would close his eyes under a row of outdoor showers and imagine himself swimming. ...

In September, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the police, the medical examiner, a prison guard and the governments of two counties, alleging that detectives falsified reports and coerced his confession, and that the prison guard groped and beat him. A separate lawsuit in the Court of Claims is planned seeking payment from the state for the wrongful incarceration.
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Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Glenn C. Loury at the Boston Review asked a much-needed question. Why does America take away so many of its citzens' liberties? According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. ... One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Why? Writes Loury: A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment. Loury posits the war on drugs and America's continuing essential racism as other contributing factors to the obscenely high incarceration rate, and correctly identifies and indicts the American voters who routinely reward the punitive-inclined policymakers. But I think Loury ignores the two main culprits: Fear and fear-mongering careerism. The fear that a family will typically feel for another family member in an violence-obsessed media-society and the political careerists (like in Dane County, Wisconsin, District Atty Brian Blanchard and former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson) who will cater to the most base instincts and insecurities clears the field for the punitive-inclined policymakers who in their liberty-depriving, family-destroying frenzy make America about as freedom-loving a place domestically as it is a peace-loving presence in its foreign policy abroad. Loury does make mention of a population "(s)toked by fear and political opportunism ... ," but in a depoliticized society like the United States where fear and lavish attention to the trivial and meaningless (celebrity, reality shows, sports and so on) continue, I think Loury needs to link the violent prison-industrial complex as a logical outgrowth of our depoliticized culture maintained by the corporate-media. Encouraging a population not to think will inevitably result in more state violence such the liberty-destroying criminal justice system domestically. ###

Innocent Woman Jailed by US Atty Biskupic Seeks Funds for Ordeal

Madison, Wisconsin — The innocent Georgia Thompson will never get what she deserves after US Atty Stephen Biskupic indicted, jailed, and went all-out to keep her in prison while her case was on appeal, but this state worker who spent four months behind bars before an appeal freed her filed a claim with the state today.

Thompson is seeking some $360,000 from the state Claims Board to reimburse her financial expenses incurred in defending herself from Biskupic’s prosecution.

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overturned her conviction in April, with one judge deriding the evidence as “beyond thin,” and ordered her freed in an extraordinary decision after oral arguments.

Governor Jim Doyle has said in the past that he supports Thompson being reimbursed.

No statement is available on the US Atty for the Eastern District of Wisconsin’s website, and Thompson has never received an apology from Biskupic for her judicial and financial nightmare.

Update: From today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:"

Sen. Russ Decker (D-Schofield), a member of the Claims Board, said he was inclined to support the payment, but that it would make more sense for the U.S. Department of Justice to foot the bill.

"I certainly will take a good look at it, but the person who ought to pay the bill is (U.S. Attorney Steven M.) Biskupic," Decker said. "He's the guy who screwed it up by going after a political agenda."

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Free Paris Hilton

The media and indeed much of America got quite a laugh out of reports that Paris Hilton was sent back to jail in tears and emotional distress.

Hilton “was taken from a courtroom screaming" and crying Friday seconds after a judge ordered her returned to jail to serve out her entire 45-day sentence for a parole violation in a reckless driving case.

"It's not right!" shouted the weeping Hilton. "Mom!" she called out to her mother in the audience.

Why is this funny? And no it's not right.

Taking away someone’s liberty should be a last resort of a society to inflict upon its citizens.

But in America, it’s done with appalling frequency: By prosecutors looking to inflate their win-loss record, by judges for whom taking away someone’s liberty can make them look tough, and by spectator citizens for whom watching Hilton is a sick sideshow.

Hilton poses no threat to society; she was convicted on charges of reckless driving and on probation violation.

Of course, the United States leads the world in taking away the liberty of its citizens.

Reads the Sentencing Project:

Bureau of Justice Statistics figures for 2005 indicate that there were nearly 2.2 million inmates in the nation’s prisons and jails, representing an increase of 2.7% (58,500) over the previous twelve months.

The new figures represent a record 33-year continuous rise in the number of inmates in the U.S.

The current incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 residents places the United States first in the world in this regard.

Or this from the Christian Science Monitor:

More than 5.6 million Americans are in prison or have served time … , according to a new report by the Justice Department released Sunday. That's 1 in 37 adults living in the United States, the highest incarceration level in the world.

And the incarceration rates are much worse for minorities, especially in urban America.

Something to think about the next time that the ass occupying the White House blares out “they hate us for our freedom.”

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