Let there be No More Deaths!

“It’s not a trail of despair,” our guide John says. “For the migrants, it is a trail of hope.”

John volunteers with No More Deaths/No Más Muertes (NMD), a humanitarian aid organization that fights to end migrant deaths along the Arizona/Mexico border. Last year (from Oct. 1, 2009 to Sept. 1, 2010), the inhospitable frontier claimed the lives of at least 253 migrants – people young and old, male and female, who died from fatigue, injury, dehydration, and hypothermia. And those were just the recovered bodies, found by Border Patrol or NMD volunteers. Hundreds, maybe thousands, never arrive and are never found. “Disappeared,” in a way.

I spent this past week (my law school spring break) along the Arizona/Mexican border and in Tucson, volunteering with No More Deaths. From the look of NMD volunteers – often young radical-types in tight pants and dyed hair who would rather “fuck borders” than secure them – you might think the organization would be a little unwieldy. Not so. With a consensus decision-making structure, they manage a smooth operation, staffing a dozen desert campsites, keeping up a fleet of donated outback vehicles, preparing medical supplies for injured migrants, and most famously, dropping blankets, cans of beans, and gallons of water along the trails.

“I found your water,” successful migrants later tell NMD. “Wouldn’t have made it without it.”

That was our task. With ten other law students, I loaded up my backpack with my own provisions (sandwich, snacks, and water), then tossed in a blanket and a half-dozen cans of beans, then took a gallon of water in each hand and set out for the day. We left water and beans under trees, targeting areas just south of contaminated water holes (“cow water”) that thirsty migrants sometimes drink in desperation – which, for many, is the beginning of the end. Bad water leads to nausea and diarrhea, until people succumb to the sun, their bloated remains – or what’s left of them after the coyotes – becoming statistics.

Since 2000, 2,104 bodies have been recovered in the Arizona section of the border.

Discarded personal effects line the trails: a toothbrush, a child’s torn t-shirt (“Don’t touch,” John says, or you’ll find scorpions and spiders), high-heels. High-heels? Yes, many people crossing the border were told that Phoenix would be a few days’ walk, no biggie, so sure, bring everything.


Empty water bottles and cans of Red Bull also dot the trails. NMD actually has a litter removal project in an effort to appease critics (and some prosecutors) who accuse them of littering.

We visited shrines – wooden crosses in the dirt decorated with photos, trinkets, and necklaces – some created by volunteers and some by migrants themselves. They mark spots where earlier migrants died. One we visited marks the death-site of a 14 year-old El Salvadoran girl, Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros, who, with her 10 year-old brother, was trying to reach their mother in Los Angeles. She started vomiting and could not keep up. Their guide (a hired “coyote”) feared that Border Patrol would catch the whole group and decided to leave her behind. When her brother arrived in LA several days later, he sounded the alarm. It was too late.

Standing around the shrine, no one really knows what to say.  Even our guides, who had been there before, have trouble finding words.

Later we run into two Border Patrol agents. Are we US citizens? Yes. After that, there’s not much more they can demand of us. But we're hiking with one Australian citizen who is also volunteering with NMD, and one of the agents rattles her: “I don’t like people coming into my country to help illegals,” he tells her. “They’re coming to ruin America.” I bite my tongue. In the end, it’s our country, too. So with the privilege of citizenship, we pass by, though not before he warns us of drug smugglers. “If you’re helping the drug mules,” he says, “I have no mercy.”

Border agents have been known, on occasion, to slash the water gallons that NMD volunteers have left out for migrants. On the other hand, they also administer medical assistance to injured migrants.

“It’s a war out there – the migrants, the agents,” I reflect one night. It’s corny, but I feel it: Arizona and its militarized border have become the frontline of a vicious battle.

At night, we huddle around the campfire, sharing warmth and the day’s emotions, hearing war stories from older volunteers (“I was charged with assaulting an officer’s boot with my face,” says John), and making smores. We find the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, concealed in the morass of stars that renders flashlights unnecessary and guides migrants through the night. Few migrants move in the daylight; discovery is too risky and the sun is too hot.

During the day, I hide under sunglasses, a safari hat, and layers of sunscreen reapplied every couple hours. Prickly desert plants tear at my pants and my skin. At night I hide under five layers of long underwear and sweatshirts, two hats (one a balaclava), wool socks, extra blankets, and a sleeping bag. When I rise, sleep-deprived from the shivering, the tent is covered in frost.

I awake to a Border Patrol helicopter flying overhead at 3 in the morning.

On our last morning at the NMD camp, just past sunrise, seven migrants walk in, completing their trek for the night and looking disheveled after four days of travel. They seem to know of NMD. The seven are young Mexican men seeking work in the United States. One has a brother in Phoenix. We offer them fresh cantaloupe and scrambled eggs. One looks sick, wrapping himself in a blanket and staring blankly ahead. We learn later that he turned himself in to Border Patrol for voluntary deportation. One NMD volunteer called his mother to say he’s on his way back.

The six others have several nights of walking ahead. Meanwhile, we law students who have “earned” our citizenship by birth pile into our van for the two-hour drive back to Tucson. The migrants will creep along as invisible as possible, trying to evade the infrared cameras on Border Patrol’s helicopters. After the journey, they’ll assume a new form of invisibility: the undocumented worker.

Before the trip, I feared I expected too much from Arizona; it’s just one state, while immigration is a national question. Undocumented people contribute to every state in this country (paying taxes to support social services they cannot enjoy), and a federal judge last year enjoined parts of Arizona’s SB1070 specifically because “the federal government has broad and exclusive authority to regulate immigration” (703 F. Supp. 2d 980). So why Arizona? Do we misconstrue a question meant for Congress by consigning it to a single state? And what do border issues have to do with the broader goal of immigration reform?  Yet Arizona delivered.

In Pima County Superior Court, we pack the courtroom to support two people who were convicted and are awaiting sentencing for the offense of working under fake work papers. They had purchased Social Security numbers. One worked as a diner cook; the other, named Gustavo, worked as a dish-washer at Hooters. Gustavo spent six months in jail awaiting a plea agreement (as if he needed to be incapacitated or rehabilitated for seeking to provide for his wife and their two young children, both American citizens). In jail, he was unable to make mortgage payments on the home they had bought ten years ago. It was seized. We wonder: Is that the new American dream, holding immigrants criminally liable for washing our dishes? Now when their probation terms end, they’ll be deported.

“Why didn’t they go to trial?” we ask their lawyer Margo, also with No More Deaths. “It was too dangerous,” she says. The evidence was too damning and the prison time was too risky.

It could have been worse. Both defendants avoided potential prison terms by taking pleas and presenting the judge with letters from employers and community leaders, all attesting to their hard work. As their lawyer reads the letters aloud to the court, it's hard not to think: Why are we deporting these people again? Both defendants apologized profusely to the court as if they were criminals. But what about so many others, people who wash our dishes and pick our lettuce but aren’t charming enough to pack a courtroom with supporters at their sentencing? Prison, I guess?

It seems these migrants cross the desert at night, tiptoeing around cacti, to reach a destination – back-kitchens, washing dishes – where they face the same basic task: trying to stay invisible.

Fishhook cacti are the coolest.

That was state court. Later we observed a criminal hearing at Tucson’s federal courthouse. Unlawful presence in the United States is not a crime (though it makes the person deportable) but unlawful entry is a misdemeanor under 8 U.S.C. §1325. And repeated unlawful entry is a felony under 8 U.S.C. §1326, carrying a minimum of two years, and a max of 20, in federal prison.

“If everyone pled guilty to the felony,” a federal public defender tells us, “it would bring down the system.” In 2008, the federal courts and Border Patrol implemented a 'streamlined' process whereby captured migrants take a plea bargain for the misdemeanor charge, receive a “time served” sentence, and then depart on a bus back to Mexico that very night.

In one swoop, “Streamline” takes a defendant from his or her initial hearing all the way to sentencing. And not just one defendant, but 70 defendants in a brisk 45 minutes. They have shackles around their wrists and ankles that jiggle through the hearing.  They wear whatever clothing they were captured in: usually jeans and t-shirts (Oakland Raiders, one says). Most look under 30. Two are women. All look scared and sleep-deprived. Most are first-time migrants looking for work, while others had been working in the U.S. for years. They had started families here before being discovered (“Make sure to use a left-turn signal,” says our NMD guide Lois) and deported to Mexico. When they were picked up in the Arizona desert, they had been trying to return “home.”

In the age of mass deportations and mass incarceration, we now have mass courtroom hearings. This rushed production, performed for hoards of non-English-speaking defendants who’ve met their lawyers only hours earlier, happens every single weekday.

Crosses at the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, Tucson.

For reasons no one seems to understand, not all captured migrants enter Streamline. Most are simply deported. The 10% who are channeled into Streamline, by contrast, get deported with a criminal record. Once they have a criminal record, if they cross again, then they’ll be subject to the harsher charge of repeated illegal entry, which carries a prison term of 2-20 years. With the plea bargain, they’ll take 20-180 days.

Ostensibly, the point of hauling these migrants into federal criminal court (instead of simply deporting them) is to instill in them the consequences of crossing again: prison time.  Yet the federal public defender says they get calls every month from deported migrants, asking: What the heck just happened? If 11 law students had to pause to understand this maze of federal statutes, sentencing schemes, and hastily recited Constitutional protections – somehow “knowingly and voluntarily waived” by non-English-speaking defendants – how could they?

So what’s the real point of this courtroom charade that distracts prosecutors and defenders from more serious violations? Maybe, as another federal public defender alluded, the criminalization of migrants is driven (dare I say it?) by profit. Migrants with prior criminal records face longer prison terms at the private facilities under contract with the federal Bureau of Prisons. Since private prisons get paid (our tax-money!) for each bed used, they seek to detain more people for longer periods of time. And their friends in elected government know it.

The federal public defender did not criticize the Department of Homeland Security for how it handles juvenile migrants, age 16 and younger. Some are actually sent to their families in the United States until DHS can locate their families in Mexico. And she was pleased that the courts had acceded to her office’s request and required the attorneys for these migrants (at $125/hour in taxpayer money) to speak Spanish.

 The magistrate, a gruff round man easily in his sixties, heard that the people sitting in the back of his courtroom were law students. “So, any questions?” he asks us afterwards. “Does the punishment fit the crime?” we ask. “Well, no,” he says. “These guys are getting a deal. The felony would get them two years in prison but they take a plea bargain for thirty days. People say they want a just sentence, but really they want a lenient sentence.”

“But you’re defining ‘just’ from the perspective of the statute,” I protest. He replies, “What should I give you to read…. Yes, the Euthyphro. Have you read it? I reread it every two years.” Plato’s famous dialogue queries the source of justice: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” His point: Who the hell knows.

“Do you believe these defendants are getting their day in court?” I ask. “Oh sure,” he says. The federal public defender behind him shakes his head and we try not to laugh. The magistrate continues: “They meet with their lawyer, they learn about the plea. But they’ve got this whole courtroom hearing. It sounds too good to be true. They fear prison time. I get them through it fast and they see the plea bargain is for real. It reduces the agony.”

The public defender later disagrees: “Yeah, he’s proud of his speed, but in our opinion, that’s not something to be proud of.” Why not? It’s not like these defendants would exchange the plea for a trial, which would expose them to prison time. Well, first, she explains, we’re worried about actually deporting American citizens in the rush. Some migrants can receive “derivative citizenship” if a grandparent was a citizen. Second, we have Constitutional requirements. Do these defendants really understand their rights under our law? Third, “if the point is to make an impression, to let them know what they’re facing if they return, why speed them through?” For their own purposes, it doesn’t make sense.

The magistrate suggests broader immigration reforms: “Americans presume that everyone wants to be a citizen and immigrate, but that’s not true. People actually like their own country and language. They come here to work and save enough money for a house or a family member’s operation or something, and then they want to return. So we need more work visas.”

Our other problem, he says, is our addiction to drugs. Mexican cops are dying because of it.

“Is it difficult to sentence people to prison time, given your ideas about what they’re coming for?” one of us asks. “It is never easy to send someone to prison,” he says. “If it is, you shouldn’t be a judge. They get medical care in prison, but that’s still 180 days that they’re not earning money for their family.” Yeah, he concedes after some nudging, it would at least be “simplest” if people avoided criminal charges altogether. But he’s not the only player, he explains; there’s the executive and there’s Congress. And they have ideas, too.

He sounds less like a judge, and more like a cog in vast, automated system.

A Border Patrol helicopter circled us for a while.

We also meet with Border Patrol (formally this time). They tell us that since 9/11, “we’re not interested in the poor guy who’s come to pick lettuce in California,” but they also tell us that in 2010, they apprehended 210,000 undocumented people in the Tucson sector alone. “You don’t know who people are until you arrest them,” one officer explains. The vast majority of migrants – all but 2.5% - are Mexican. The agents discuss their frustration with sending people back over the border only to catch them again – and again and again. So they’ve started “lateral deportations”: Some people caught in Arizona will be deported to the California border or even flown into Mexico’s interior. And of course, they’ve started prosecuting migrants, too.

“Is it your belief,” we ask, “that leaving food and water for migrants aids and abets illegal immigration?” The Tucson section chief, who oversees 700 agents, cuts the tension by saying: “Do I have to answer that?” After all their tough talk on border security and terrorist threats, we need the laugh. That’s for the courts, he says, and he names a 2-1 decision (621 F.3d 914) at the Ninth Circuit tossing out the littering conviction of a NMD volunteer for putting out gallons of water.

But the courts aside, does providing food and water to migrants “aid and abet”? (Those classic words are not actually in the statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1324, but they’re magical in a way.) Those six migrants who visited the No More Deaths camp and left re-hydrated had a better shot of reaching Tucson and evading Border Patrol. But that’s simply because they’re not going to die. Their successful entry into the United States might be seen as the byproduct of simply staying alive.

Mt. Baboquivari, the tall peak to the left, orients migrants.

Okay, well, do migrants embark on this trek because they know No More Deaths leaves water on the trail? Do NMD activities increase border crossings? Our NMD guide John part-laughs, part-laments in reply: “It’s a vast desert out there; a couple gallons is a drop in the bucket.” And it’s a rather empty bucket, we remember, knowing that another 40 bodies were recovered in the last four months of 2010. Whether NMD’s gallons actually increase the number of undocumented immigrants is an empirical question, and it will probably never be answered. But it seems plain to me that potential migrants, seeking a better life, don’t come because of NMD’s gallons, if they know about them at all. As the song says: “There ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough, to keep me from getting to you.”

NMD itself, as an organization, does not seem to worry about the “aid and abet” question: their work is humanitarian, the political ramifications be damned. But I think about it because, well, I am not an anarchist: I believe in the necessity of borders and the value of citizenship. Whether it’s schools or banking regulations, I don’t think we can build just institutions that represent us without imposing some restrictions to determine who’s in and who’s out. So the question for me is not the existence of such restrictions, but their fairness. How do our immigration laws measure up? Why should Mexican citizens have to wait decades longer to get legal residency than non-Mexicans?

Impatient with the pace of federal reforms, Arizona has embarked on its own anti-immigrant campaign, starting famously with SB1070. One provision, among others, requires a police officer to determine the immigration status of anyone stopped, detained, or arrested “if there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is unlawfully present in the United States.” (A federal court in July 2010 decided that this section was likely preempted by federal law and enjoined it.)

SB1070 was just the beginning. Arizona has become “Aryanzona” or “Errorzona” (according to activist buttons we saw) as anti-immigrant fervor takes over the Arizona statehouse. We analyzed 18 pending anti-immigrant bills for the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a human rights legal organization in Tucson. Most of them teeter between laughable and terrifying. One would create a separate Arizona citizenship (for children of US citizens or legal residents only); one taxes international money transfers (penalizing migrants trying to send money home); and another amends the state constitution to prohibit judges from considering international law.

One “omnibus” bill, SB1611, makes it virtually impossible for undocumented people to exist in Arizona. It requires proof of legal status to enroll in any K-12 school or college; to buy, register, or even drive a car (or you go to jail for 30 days and forfeit your vehicle); or to obtain any license, including a marriage license. Another bill requires medical personnel to check and report patients’ legal statuses before treating them. (How many people will forego necessary medical care if this bill passes?) One bill, now a law, authorizes the Arizona Senate president and House speaker to hire lawyers, at taxpayer expense, to represent their respective chambers in defending SB1070.

All have passed out of initial committees. Most, I expect, will become law. All – let us hope (me especially, as the grandchild of immigrants) – will be condemned by future generations.  [Update: Five of the major bills, including the omnibus bill, were voted down by the AZ Senate on March 17.]

We had tough moments: the death sites (“they knew it was her from the distinctive green shoes”), the jiggle of 70 leg shackles in the courtroom, the disgrace of locking people up to turn a profit. And there was the purely physical: frigid nights, makeshift bathrooms, heavy backpacks. “I can’t wait to get back to law school so we can sleep in again,” one person half-joked.

But we also hiked through stunning scenery, rode in the beds of pick-up trucks, made smores by the campfire, and tilted our heads back to the stars. We belted “my hips don’t lie!” with Shakira and Wyclef in our 15-person van, took midnight trips to taco-trucks, and played soccer at the NMD camp, at highway rest-stops, and outside our convent in the city. We danced at Tucson’s “Hotel Congress” nightclub for hours until one day turned into the next. “Stay fierce,” advised the singer.

I remember thinking as we danced: This morning I woke up in Arivaca, 12 miles from the Mexico border, and ate breakfast in the company of people who are now walking for the chance (nothing guaranteed) of a better life. They’re back on the trails, trying to avoid cacti, trying to stay invisible. And I am dancing at “Hotel Congress”; it’s my spring break; I’m tipsy; and my government has provided me with tens of thousands of dollars in loans to furnish an education.

The contrast is stark. So activists sometimes blame themselves, feeling guilty for their relative affluence and their fun. They think: How can we melt marshmallows over chocolate or dance in nightclubs when others are walking in the desert? Yes, these juxtapositions are real, but they don’t mean we must live in constant mourning or adopt aesthetic routines like desert migrants. That’s not what “solidarity” means. Feeling guilty for our fun saps our will to live. It hinders our ability to stand up for marginalized others and it makes a mockery of the life we desire for them.

It was not always obvious in the moment, since the desert sun makes it hard to think in complete sentences. But the work, I realize, is essentially hopeful, despite the morbid nature of our task (the organization, after all, is called “No More Deaths”). It is hopeful in reflecting not just the desperation of these migrants (what led them to make this desert trek?), but also their aspirations for a better life. No one believes in America quite like immigrants do.

Putting out water is not the solution to our immigration dilemma. But it does not purport to be. It’s just a simple idea that I can embrace without caveats: Let there be no more deaths.

  

My tripmates were excellent photographers.  Photos courtesy of them.

The world spins

It has not been a good week to have law school exams.  The world did not stop spinning.

In Georgia, thousands of prisoners across seven prisons sat down in their cells to nonviolently protest their slavery-like conditions.  In the words of the 13th Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States."  Hidden in the ellipses, however, is an exception: "except as a punishment for crime."  It seems prisoners have had enough.  I bet prisons across the country are clamping down, lest others get ideas.  An Ohio prisoner I once interviewed spent months in solitary confinement for trying to organize a work stoppage.

In London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became perhaps the first person to spend a week in jail for "questioning" related to sexual assault.  Apparently no charges have been filed (yet).  WikiLeaks has sidelined the sexual assault issue, but nuanced writers have managed to criticize the politically motivated prosecution without trivializing the seriousness of sexual violence.

In Washington today, the Senate voted against the DREAM Act and in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," finally answering the question of whom the Republicans hate more: immigrants or queers.  So, congratulations, queers.  Now you too can forcibly occupy foreign lands - or at least do so openly.  Nothing says "empowerment" quite like the opportunity to oppress others.  Half-joking aside, of course I support the repeal.  The military changes hearts and minds - if not in Iraq, then here at home.  African Americans once turned to the military to assert their own social rights.

I finished exams in torts and Constitutional law.  Last up: property.

Rehabilitated ex-felons: Give us a chance

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org (with a little time-delay).

Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.

Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment. “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd. Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.

Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.

For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy. Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.

Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.

Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission. “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”

After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.

The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence. Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population. For 18-year-olds arrested for burglary in 1980, that point was 3.8 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.

Employment barriers don’t make us any safer. They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society. “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”

Disney workers fast for health care

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

A Minnie Mouse lookalike outside Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel striking with union local 681.

Eight Disneyland Hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local Union 11 in Anaheim, California, engaged in a week-long hunger strike to highlight their two-year dispute on health care and other labor issues with the Walt Disney Company. The eight workers ended their hunger strike on Tuesday, as five more began fasting.

The workers want to keep the health plan that their union provides (paid for in lieu of pay raises), while Disney proposes deducting health care costs from workers’ wages. Disney maintains that their plan would cost $250 a month per family, while the union estimates $500. Workers typically earn $11-13 an hour.

The Disney dispute mirrors an exacerbating national trend: Employment no longer guarantees satisfactory health care coverage. Between 2001 and 2007, insurance premiums rose 78% while wages rose 19%. As health care costs rise, employers drop benefits, contributing to the number of uninsured Americans.

One in six full-time workers, or 21 million people, were uninsured for all 12 months of 2008. Astoundingly, 45% of the nation’s 46 million uninsured actually worked full-time. And the percentage of Americans who receive health insurance through their employer has decreased from 64% in 2000 to 59% in 2008.

The Disney workers seem determined not to become another statistic.

Zinn on civil obedience

In memory of Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, I reread an address he gave at Johns Hopkins University in November 1970, “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States. In the address, Zinn discussed his frustration with the so-called “problem of civil disobedience.” That’s “topsy-turvy,” he said, just plain backwards, like a protester getting clubbed by the police and then getting arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Here’s Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Facing injustice, we are oblivious if not complacent. Why? Because we have undue deference for the law. “There is nothing sacred about the law,” Zinn went on to say in the same address.

“The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.”

Prison rape no joke

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

Private prisons don’t solve CA budget crisis

Crossposted from WagingNonviolence.org.

Steep tuition raises at California universities have spurred widespread student protests and sit-ins. These actions were reportedly “the tipping point” that prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask a very good question:

Thirty years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons. Today almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7 1/2 percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?

Unfortunately, in this State of the State address, Schwarzenegger found only half the answer. He proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit California from spending more on prisons than on higher education. To achieve that goal, he recommended privatizing at least some of California’s prisons. “Competition and choice are always good,” Schwarzenegger optimistically declared.

Other states have tried privatization. And cost-savings promised by private prisons “have simply not materialized,” according to the Department of Justice (p.68). But while cost-savings have been scarce, security breaches have been abundant. One survey found 49% more inmate-on-staff assaults and 65% more inmate-on-inmate assaults in private facilities than in comparable public ones.

Private corporations seek profits by cutting corners. They attract less-qualified workers by providing inferior wages and benefits than state agencies. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association has already condemned Schwarzenegger’s proposal. Private prisons also generate profits by cutting prisoners’ food, medicine, drug treatment, GED classes, and reentry planning.

That’s a mistake. Inmate welfare is not just a Constitutional requirement; it’s smart policy. Education, drug treatment, and release planning reduce recidivism.

The California student protests against tuition hikes succeeded in capturing Schwarzenegger’s attention. California students shouldn’t stop there. The current proposal pits the interests of students against those of prisoners. Both groups in fact seek a shared outcome: greater access to public education.

There’s a better way to reduce prison costs: reduce the prison population (e.g., Michigan in recent years). End lengthy sentences for nonviolent offenders. Expand probation, parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for addicted and mentally ill offenders. Schwarzenegger is right to question prison costs, but his privatization proposal isn’t the answer.

Wage theft: the forgotten crime wave

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

Low-wage workers and community supporters gathered in more than forty cities across the U.S. on Thursday to condemn wage theft, the illegal underpayment or non-payment of wages. The National Day of Action to Stop Wage Theft was organized by Interfaith Worker Justice, a national alliance. Wage theft is a national crime wave that robs millions of workers of billions of dollars.

Low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles were cheated of an average $51 a week, according to a recent report co-authored by several universities, entitled, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities.” Among the workers surveyed, 1 in 4 were paid less than the legally-required minimum wage, and 3 out of 4 who worked overtime hours were not paid the legally-required overtime.

Employers were creative in stealing wages: promising higher wages but paying only the minimum, paying less than minimum wage, not paying for all hours worked, misclassifying workers as exempt from overtime pay, deducting equipment or transportation “fees” from paychecks, stealing tips, misclassifying workers as independent contractors, or simply not paying workers at all.

In July, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) introduced the Wage Theft Prevention Act (H.R. 3303), which begins the statute of limitations from the date the employer is notified instead of the date of the theft. Under current law, delays result in permanent loss of back pay. Legislation is also moving at the state-level. In Ohio this week, State Senator Morano introduced the Wage Protection Act, empowering the state commerce department to investigate more complaints.

But advocacy for workers happens at the day-to-day level by affiliates of the national Interfaith Worker Justice, such as the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers’ Center, which canvassed yesterday across the city to reach low-income workers. Since 2005, the small organization has taken over 500 wage theft reports and helped recover over $500,000 in unpaid wages. The Cincinnati group aims to empower workers to challenge dangerous working conditions and educate workers about how to defend their rights, including the rights of immigrants.

“I had to make decisions on whether to pay rent or buy food,” said Cincinnati resident Frazier Kidd, who explained his struggle after being cheated of promised wages. “Thou shalt not steal,” said Kim Bobo, Director of the national Interfaith Worker Justice. “It’s a pretty straightforward message.”

The cruelest sheriff in America

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” has made a name for himself by being tougher on prisoners than on crime. Since 1993, he has overseen law enforcement and county jails in Maricopa County, Arizona, an area of nearly four million people that includes Phoenix. William Finnegan profiles (subscription only) the 77-year-old sheriff in The New Yorker’s July 20 issue.

Arpaio seems to delight in dehumanizing others. After winning his first election in 1993, he built a tent-city jail in an area where temperatures can rise to 135 degrees. He banned cigarettes, hot lunches, coffee, and salt and pepper, rejecting a study he had commissioned when it found harsh jail conditions ineffective at reducing recidivism. He gave inmates just two meals a day, each at 30 cents a head. He instituted black-and-white striped uniforms, but added pink underwear and pink socks. Several times he humiliated prisoners by marching them between facilities in the pink underwear alone. The prisoners nicknamed him “Hitler.”

Deaths and injuries in Arpaio’s jails have already cost Maricopa County taxpayers $43 million in court and settlement expenses. Arpaio’s officers have used stun guns against prisoners who were already immobilized in restraint chairs. As Finnegan writes, “The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court.”

Inmates in Maricopa County’s jails have shaken off the threat of retaliation and engaged in civil disobedience. In one of the largest US prison hunger strikes this past Cinco de Mayo, 500 inmates refused the morning meal and 900 refused the evening meal. Activists outside the jails have organized candlelight vigils, written letters, demonstrated at county meetings, and picketed Arpaio’s offices. On February 28, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and El Puente Arizona organized a “March to Stop the Hate” focusing on Arpaio’s treatment of undocumented immigrants. Some 3,000 people rallied in downtown Phoenix.

Zack de la Rocha, of Rage Against the Machine, spoke (youtube) at that march:

In the latest Arpaio investigation, the US Department of Justice is reviewing his discriminatory profiling in the arrest and treatment of possibly undocumented people. Perhaps we might one day thwart this mockery of a ‘public safety’ official, who takes pride in the detestable quality of his jail food and in situating his open-air tent-city jail beside a dump, who diverts limited county dollars away from investigating violent crime or even responding promptly to emergency calls, to instead raid workplaces in search of undocumented yet taxpaying immigrants.

Who the real “criminal” is, one hardly has to wonder.

The Palestinian Gandhis

To those who read beyond the American media, it's well-known that the Israeli army regularly demolishes Palestinian homes for lacking building permits, which are nearly impossible to obtain.

These actions constitute ethnic cleansing. They're intended to clear space for settler growth and create a new "demographic reality." To understand the bureaucratic violence that maintains the Israeli occupation, watch this must-see video from South Mt. Hebron in the West Bank. It documents the demolition of a Bedouin home and the arrest of Ezra Nawi (in green), an Israeli human rights protester who nonviolently defended the home alongside the Bedouin family.



"The only thing that will be left here is hatred," Nawi, sitting handcuffed, says to the snickering Israeli soldiers. It's shocking how little compassion they have for the lives they're destroying.

You can read more on Ezra Nawi here. You can attempt to shame the Israeli government here.

Not long ago, Obama flew to Cairo and declared, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed." But I have this other dream in which Obama flies to Israel for a grand speech to the Zionist/Jewish world. And he tells the Zionists, with the same unmistakable intonation, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed."

And they yawn, because they know that it does.

The Israelis (like the U.S.) understand that a state can use the rhetoric of "terrorism" to mask its own violence. What, after all, is worse than war but terrorism, the indiscriminate killing of civilians? That's partly why the Zionist lobby constantly asserts its victimhood: to claim, even as they gleefully turn an unarmed Arab family homeless, that they're simply acting in self-defense.

Under a 42-year occupation, Palestinians also understand that Israeli violence works, as one person explained: "Palestinians can be successful software engineers, they can have an espresso in a café and blog on their MacBooks, but they cannot hide from their children that they are powerless in the face of an Israeli teenager holding a gun who may or may not be in a good mood.”

Nonviolence can win - but only if the international community encourages it, or at least ceases to ignore it. For years, Palestinians have protested every week in Bil'in against the wall built on their farmland. Communities rally in seconds when Israeli bulldozers arrive to demolish homes. I saw it with my own eyes in 2005. Palestinian nonviolence exists despite Israeli efforts to intimidate nonviolent protesters (indeed, four peaceful protesters have been killed in the past year) or escalate nonviolent rallies or arrest nonviolent Palestinian leaders like Azmi Al Shoukhi. It exists despite Zionist efforts, like this Forward editorial, calling Palestinian nonviolence "a fantasy."

"Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?" is a distraction intended to hide Israeli violence.