Civil Rights – Page 12 – The Wrongologist

Why Are Police Looking for Apologies?

What’s with the police union presidents in New York City, St. Louis and Cleveland? All are outraged by fairly tepid comments on the recent and controversial actions of their members, and all want apologies now, dammit. Let’s start with Cleveland.

TPM reports that the Cleveland police union has demanded that the Cleveland Browns football team apologize for a player who wore a T-shirt before last Sunday’s game protesting the police shootings of two black people. Here is the T-shirt:

That’s Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins wearing a shirt reading “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III” during pre-game warmups.

To refresh your memory, Rice was the 12 year old kid killed last month when a Cleveland police officer shot him when he mistook the boy’s toy gun for a real weapon. John Crawford, 22, was killed by police in August at a Cleveland area Wal-Mart while he was holding an air rifle. Crawford was shot while doing absolutely nothing illegal. He was not threatening anyone. He was on his phone in Walmart carrying an item that’s sold at the store. Cops showed up and shot him.

So, seeing the T-shirt, Cleveland Police Patrolman Union President Jeff Follmer reacted:

It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law…They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.

So, nice stadium ya got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. The Browns did not apologize.

On to St. Louis, where the police overreacted earlier this month after a few Rams players entered their stadium making the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture popular with protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. The St. Louis Police Association called the gesture “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory”, asked the Rams team for an apology, and called on the NFL to punish the players who ran on to the field using the “hands up” gesture.

And in New York City, the city’s Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA) have been angered by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reaction to the killing of Eric Garner. And NYC’s cops are now telling the Mayor to stay away from cop funerals. The PBA distributed a flier to members, blaring: “DON’T LET THEM INSULT YOUR SACRIFICE!” Cops were encouraged to sign and submit the “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” waiver to ban what they see as a cop-bashing mayor from their funerals. The NYC mayor traditionally attends all funerals for fallen officers.

De Blasio basically said that he didn’t think the NYPD should be chokeholding its citizens to death, a matter that may require a seasoned NYC lawyer Mitchel Ashley or others to intervene for the families left behind. PBA President Patrick Lynch reacted by accusing the mayor of throwing cops “under the bus.”

De Blasio then went further, speaking about his 17-year-old mixed race son Dante:

We’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him…

That was too much, and PBA president Lynch replied: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

We have to teach our children, our sons and our daughters, no matter what they look like, to respect New York City police officers, teach them to comply with New York City police officers even if they think it’s unjust.

Three cities where cops use questionable tactics. Three cities where using those tactics caused controversial deaths. Three cities where the police are thin-skinned when their tactics are questioned.

These thin-skinned reactions seem totally natural, and consistent with a culture of “comply or die”.

And the police union presidents, by jumping on the comments of athletes and the NYC mayor, make a clear case against public-sector unions. They are not there to serve or protect the greater community, they are there to serve and protect their members, right or wrong. The presidents also are making the case that the police are not part of the community, but exist in a world above the community, since they deserve the community’s respect and legal immunity, regardless of their actions.

And it’s remarkable to see just how incredibly insular, tone-deaf and hyper-sensitive these police union presidents, and at least some of their rank and file, seem to be.

In Cleveland, the union president should be more concerned about the recently completed two-year Justice Department study that found the Cleveland police have a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force”. Will different tactics emerge as the Cleveland police adapt to their consent decree?

We need to rein in our police. There is way too much “comply or else” out on the streets. We see weapons meant for warfare pointed at people trying to exercise the small shred of their free speech rights that remain. All of these cops who killed in these controversial cases have said that in the same circumstances, they would shoot/choke again.

Who should receive the apologies? Hint: it’s not the cops.

UPDATE:

The column above needs to be updated with the news that on Monday, the Supreme Court decided that our police don’t have to know the law when they stop or detain a citizen. The message is that ignorance of the law is not a barrier to policing. From Think Progress:

There is one simple concept that law students learn in their very first weeks of criminal law class: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. This principle means that when an individual violates the law, it doesn’t matter whether or not they knew what the law said. If it’s a crime, and they are found to have committed the elements of that crime, they are guilty.

But now, that rule doesn’t apply to the police. On Monday, the US Supreme Court in an 8-1 ruling, found that North Carolina cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though the reason he was pulled over was not a violation of the law.

The case involved the 2009 arrest of Nicholas Heien near Dobson, North Carolina. Sgt. Matt Darisse pulled Heien over for having only one working brake light, then found a bag of cocaine while searching his vehicle and charged him with attempted drug trafficking. However, state law only requires motorists to have one brake light working at any time. Heien’s attorneys argued that this made Darisse’s search unlawful. They lost.

So, our Supremes failed to draw a line limiting the scope of police stops, at a time when they are rampant and racially disproportionate. Now, police have more leeway to stop passengers on the road, even in jurisdictions that had previously said cops are not justified when they make mistakes of law.

During the past weeks, we have heard a lot about Grand Jury procedure and the “latitude” our legal system affords police and prosecutors. That latitude apparently now includes their right to be ignorant, of our laws. That goes along with:

• Their latitude in discerning what may be a threat to their person.
• Their latitude in the use of fire-power.

Now, they have latitude not to know the laws they enforce.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 14, 2014

Tough week trying to pick the worst from among the many, many wrongs this week:

• Congress passes a budget that defangs Dodd-Frank: Citibank got Congress to let the big banks place their risky derivatives business back under the protection of taxpayer-paid insurance. So we get to shoulder the losses when the next big bank failure comes. The Congress attached it to the CRomnibus spending bill that the president won’t veto. We can dig through the couch cushions for spare change to bail out the banks next time. Simon Johnson said it best:

Give enough clever people the wrong incentives and they will destroy anything.

• Congress also lowered funding for the EPA, and stuck in a provision that allows private funding of national conventions. They were previously publicly funded.
• Some detail on “we tortured some folks” became public with the publishing of the CIA Lite torture report. If that wasn’t wrong enough, many pols and pundits just gave up, and said torture was useful and necessary. One right thing was John McCain’s speech on the floor of the Senate debunking torture as a means of getting information.
• There was more wrong-headed messaging about the Ferguson/Garner cases. But there was also many “die-in” demonstrations around the country along with the usual finger-pointing about the demonstrators’ reactions, both peaceful and not-so-peaceful.

Dick Cheney continued his spirited defense of the indefensible:

CIA Director Brennan insisted on calling torture “Enhanced Interrogation”:

Passing of the torch brings irony to the Senate:

Some see the “shoot first” mentality as a feature, not a bug in the system:

Some see Xmas as their favorite time of the year:

Some see Xmas as a giant pain:

Is Our System More Like Huxley, or Orwell?

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. – Judge Learned Hand

Yesterday was Human Rights Day. Maybe, with all that has happened to our human rights in post-9/11 America, it is a good time to look very carefully at the current spate of bad outcomes for people who draw attention from our police. One question is, who still believes in our system? Below is one answer that points to where we are:

Here is the poll question that produced the above response:

How much confidence do you have in police officers in your community to not use excessive force on suspects: A great deal, a fair amount, just some, or very little confidence?

Note that “no confidence” was not an option for your answer. One way to look at the poll is that it shows that our system is working exactly as it is intended to work. From Ian Welsh: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

If a police officer tells you to do anything, you do it immediately. If you do not, anything that happens to you, up to and including death, is your problem. The legal system exists today to ensure compliance.

And if you fail to do what is asked, the police will say, “He/she was non-compliant.” That is a way that this part of the American system performs as designed. It rewards compliance, it identifies those who will not obey laws, or who will fight or organize against the system, and then it works to push them down.

In our system, the wolves and the sheep self-identify, they know which group they belong to. If an injustice is committed, if people protest, the most aggressive protestors, even if not violent, are arrested. Our oligarchy is built on the idea that we must keep people from effectively resisting. More from Ian Welsh:

Any part of the population which is inclined to resist, must be taught that it cannot resist. Get out millions to demonstrate against the Iraq war: it will not work. Protest against police killings of African Americans, it will not work.

Occupy Wall Street? That didn’t work either. The system operates in two ways to repress and control people. America’s system has been 80% Huxley and 20% Orwell for decades, but now, the ratios are approaching 50/50. Let’s unpack the Orwell vs. Huxley worldviews: (h/t highexistence.com)

• Orwell feared the government would ban books.
• Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban books, because no one would want to read them.
• Orwell feared the government would deprive us of information.
• Huxley feared they would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be invisible in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
So, we became the trivial culture that Huxley feared. Now, the powers that be are tilting to Orwell to nudge us toward a captive culture.

Huxley’s vision of how human nature or human aspirations could be manipulated for the purposes of the controlling elite rings true in the US. But, Orwell’s depiction of the controlling/interlocking elites of allegedly opposed factions (R’s vs. D’s, government vs. private sector, Wall Street vs. Main Street) is truer than ever before.

So, both are right. Orwell’s fear is already a reality in the East (North Korea, China, Iran) and Huxley’s fear is reality in the West (US, Scandinavia, UK).

Look at how easily the citizenry acquiesced to militarized police in Boston a couple of years ago. Tanks rolled down the streets and officers dressed like they were in Afghanistan demanded that people go inside their houses, for their “safety”. This “army” then searched for the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. This took place over a huge area—whole towns. Was this just the police testing their new toys? Or was it also something darker… like a test of how far the government can go with the Security State? It didn’t hurt that the people got to say they were “Boston Strong” and got the rest of the country to buy in to that.

Power and information are continua. The Orwellian vision tends towards power, while the Huxleyian view tends toward information. However, they are neither separate, nor divisible. Human history has always used deceit as a tool, backed by power, while the biggest bullies have tried to control things since prehistory.

Both manifest legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, wherein the government becomes the largest organized crime syndicate, controlled by the best organized criminals. Welcome to America.

These “crime syndicates” are destroying the foundations of our society, creating the twin near-religions of the State and the Corporation.

The system will not change until the people who want change have enough power to force change. But first, they have to open their eyes to what is happening: Ordinary citizens cannot change the system if the elites don’t agree with the changes the plebes want to make. If they try, they will be arrested or killed at the scene. This must change first.

After that, we can begin working to restore the fundamental systemic change that we brought about during the times of FDR through LBJ.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – December 7, 2014

Still thinking about the string of police cases, their very similar nature and outcomes. It isn’t a secret that America has a broad, diverse population and a terrible past trying to deal with our diversity.

Our past isn’t going away. Our diverse population isn’t going away either. It’s who we are. We occasionally celebrate it, boasting that we are a melting pot. But, we might be more accurately described as a smorgasbord, not a one pot dinner. That means you can avoid the pickled herring if you don’t like it.

But it’s always rude to ridicule people who like pickled herring. And many of us have moved way beyond rude to outright hostile, and the whole buffet table could be pulled down right in front of our eyes.

The food fight is already in progress, except it has real casualties. We are many kinds of American, and this is our home. Can we find a way to keep it?

It is all about your perspective:

More perspective:

Other perspectives:

Media explains how to spin the unspinable:

Some kids’ Xmas lists are out of reach:

Friday Music Break – December 5, 2014

Thinking today about the fact that the New York grand jury did not indict NYPD’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner, who died gasping “I can’t breathe” while in the custody of police outside a Staten Island convenience store. Here, from the indispensable MuckRock, is a screen shot from NYPD’s use of force policy:

You can read the entire policy at MuckRock.

So today’s question is: Are we having the oft-promised national conversation? Is there a fundamental contempt for the law among the people empowered to enforce it? And have we gone beyond just needing a discussion? We already have policies which should have prevented what happened to Amadou Diallo from happening to Michael Brown or to Eric Garner.

Police officers kill too many black people, and then too often, face little or no accountability, particularly when there’s no video to show America what went down.

To help you meditate over the weekend, here is Randy Newman’s “Jolly Coppers on Parade”. His music is a counterpoint to the images. Call it irony, call it disrespect by demonstrators or by the police, call it whatever you need. Obviously not all cops are like the ones we’re seeing in this video, but we all know they are out there:

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke Wednesday onto the media about the matter, talking about his 16 year old biracial son Dante: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

This is profoundly personal to me…I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he [the president] said, ‘I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens.’ And I said to him, I did.

De Blasio went on to note that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, “have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face.” More from de Blasio:

Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

This has been going on for centuries, folks. Throwing both hands up in the air signals either “Don’t shoot” or simply despair for changing the way things are.
It’s impossible to tell the difference anymore.

See you on Sunday.

Ferguson Points to Our Real Problem

This is not a column about Ferguson, except by extension. In August, after Ferguson, the images of cops climbing out of armored vehicles with military-grade weapons caused some in both Houses of Congress to push for change in the program. Lawmakers vowed changes to the 1033 Pentagon program that provides military-grade equipment to local police. The Obama administration called for a policy review of the 1033 program, but on Monday, they backed away from substantive changes to the program.

There was a White House meeting on Monday to address the issues raised by military-style policing and Ferguson. Yet, the evidence shows that the meeting has changed nothing. This was The Guardian’s Monday headline:

Obama resists demands to curtail police militarization calling instead for improved officer training

Mr. Obama did call for a $263m, three-year spending which, if approved by Congress, could lead to the purchase of 50,000 lapel-mounted cameras to record police officers on the job.

Sounds good, but there are 765,000 state & local law enforcement officers in America, so you better hope that you are stopped by one of the 6.3% of local police officers that will have a federally-funded camera three years from now. Oh, and hope that the digital file of your brush with the law hasn’t been accidentally erased.

The Institute for Public Accuracy made comments from Peter Kraska available. Kraska is considered a leading expert on police militarization. He said yesterday: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

From my meeting at the White House, frankly, they — like most political players — were interested in a quick fix. They want to hear that by somehow tweaking the 1033 program (which transfers equipment from the Pentagon to local law enforcement) that they can have an impact. That program is important symbolically, but there’s an entire for-profit police militarization industry that wouldn’t be affected.

We also have to review the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program which provides far more to local police than does the DOD. DHS grants are lucrative enough that many defense contractors are now turning their attention to police agencies — and some new companies focus solely on selling military-grade weaponry to police agencies who get those grants.

That means we’re now building a new industry whose sole function is to militarize domestic police departments. Which means it won’t be long before we see pro-militarization lobbying and pressure groups with lots of (mostly taxpayer) money to spend to fight just the reforms the Obama administration and some in Congress say are necessary.

Say hello to the military/police/industrial complex.

And why have we entered a time of “shoot first” in our cities? It must be because our police feel that their lives are more in danger than ever. Sorry, that isn’t supported by the facts: The number of law enforcement officers killed as a result of criminal acts:

2004: 57
2009: 48
2012: 49
2013: 27

So, if there are 765k in local law enforcement that equates to a 2013 death rate from criminals of 3 per hundred thousand per year. Also, 2013 incidents are equal to the lowest level since 1887. Yet, nationwide, America’s police kill roughly one person a day:

The Economist, August 2014

And evidence exists that this number is dramatically understated. The FB page, Killed by Police says the number of deaths at the hands of police as reported to them since their launch in May 2013, is 1450. In 1994, Congress instructed the DOJ to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and “publish an annual summary”. They have yet to do that. There are over 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, yet fewer than 900 report their shootings to the FBI.

Radley Balko in The WaPo concludes that militarization of police and their use of military-style force to suppress protests are bad mistakes. He quotes the Salt Lake City chief of police, Chris Burbank:

I just don’t like the riot gear…Some say not using it exposes my officers to a little bit more risk. That could be, but risk is part of the job. I’m just convinced that when we don riot gear, it says ‘throw rocks and bottles at us.’ It invites confrontation. Two-way communication and cooperation are what’s important. If one side overreacts, then it all falls apart.

We have bulked up America’s police. With DOD’s assistance, they developed units trained and equipped in military-style tactics. They demonstrate a consistent picture of organizations evolving from community-based law enforcement to security services whose primarily focus is maintaining public order. They see protests by minority or politically dissident elements as inherently illegitimate and potentially violent. The police can pretty much do whatever they want, to whomever they want, whenever they want. And it’s gonna be your fault.

Order, not justice is the new goal of our police, a significant shift in emphasis. As such, displays of overwhelming force are considered a logical way to prevent organized protests from happening. If demonstrations occur in spite of police presence, then massive use of force is a logical way to quell its impact and prevent its re-occurrence.

Many things demonstrate the evolution in America of police from “Protect and Serve” to a quasi-military force. This creates an emotional distance from the communities they patrol. We see this most clearly in their casual use of force, often disproportionate to the situation, and with a near-total lack of accountability.

That is an ugly symptom of our Republic’s weakness. The crushing of the Occupy Movement’s camps and the militarized response to the Ferguson protests are the natural outcome of our new policing.

When the country was founded, there were no organized police departments, and there wouldn’t be for about 50 years. Public order was maintained through private means, in worst cases by calling up the militia. The Founders were quite wary of standing armies and the threat they could pose to liberty, but they concluded (reluctantly) that the country needed an army for national defense.

They feared the idea of troops patrolling city streets — a justified fear colored by the antagonism between British troops and residents of Boston in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

The Founders couldn’t have envisioned police as they exist today. It is probably safe to say they’d be appalled at the idea of police, dressed and armed like soldiers, breaking into private homes in the middle of the night, as happens on drug busts on most nights in America. Using militarized police to roust demonstrators would likely be appalling to them as well.

Let’s close with Radley Balko:

We got here by way of a number of political decisions and policies passed over 40 years. There was never a single law or policy that militarized our police departments — so there was never really a public debate over whether this was a good or bad thing.

It’s time to have that debate.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 30, 2014

Thought for today: “We are what we repeatedly do.” Aristotle

And some things, we repeatedly do over and over. Take Ferguson, possibly becoming a new Selma. Or take our bad economy, or take Afghanistan.

This month, Americans got some news the media spun as good: The US unemployment rate fell to the lowest level since late 2007. The 5.8% unemployment rate has been seen as proof of economic recovery. But, the jobs created were mostly part-time work, often at low pay. Yes, these jobs provided employment, but did little to improve the overall economy.

As a result, an increasing number of Americans – 800,000 more than last year – have taken a second or third job, according to the BLS. This is Americans taking jobs they don’t really want, unable to pay their bills despite work, and relying on food banks and welfare to make up the difference.

And the problem is growing. In October, about 7 million Americans had part-time jobs but wanted to work full-time. Over 2.1 million Americans rely on two part-time jobs to see them through. Another 4 million have one full-time job and one part-time job, a number that increased by 444,000 since last year.

These workers earn minimum or near-minimum wage, bringing home less than $1,000 a month. In 2013, 468,000 retail workers earned minimum wage or lower. According to Pew Research Center, 1.4 million cashiers – the most common part-time job – earn less than $10.10 an hour. Part-time Walmart workers often bring home between $200 to $400 every two weeks. This is a weak contribution to our economy. These workers, despite being employed, end up relying on government assistance in the form of food stamps and housing subsidies. And when the food stamps run out, they turn to their communities and the local food banks. So, there were Black Friday demonstrations atWalmart stores all across America, and some cities had this response:

Part of your taxpayer dollars are paying Wal-Mart employees the money that the Walton’s refuse to pay them. This isn’t complicated. If you have a job at Wal-Mart and you still need Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing, then you aren’t just getting shafted by the Walton’s. You’re also being paid your missing wages by the federal government. Another piece of your tax dollars supported military-style protection at Walmart as a partial response to the Black Friday demonstrations.

As Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do. Americans aren’t deadbeats. The Walton’s are the deadbeats.

Black Friday means something radically different to the homeless:

New normal on Thanksgiving:

Life in the Billionaire’s bubble:

Who gets the benefit of the doubt?

No need to attack America:

Post-Thanksgiving Digestif

It is a tradition on Thanksgiving at the Mansion of Wrong to play “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie. It was on November 28, 1965 in Stockbridge, MA that Arlo was convicted of littering:

Sample lyric:

27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

Here are your post-Thanksgiving links:

Buzzfeed asked Brits to fill in a map of the US. Here is good one:

Imagine trying to do that for the map of the UK.

Check out this Silicon Valley job title generator: The Wrongologist got ”Shareability Disruptor”

America can’t take any more bullshit: The Onion captures our current angst.

Milk is the new Coke: Why, yes, we are happy to pay twice as much for milk! If there’s one company you can trust to produce milk that is lower in sugar and higher in good things for you, it’s Coca-Cola.

It’s a doggy dog world:

Dog head-turning shows they do understand what you say. Naturally. How else could they play poker?

Dogs sloppy water bowl action is smart: Dogs extended more of their tongues to whack the water with a much wider surface area, then use their tongues to pull the water upward into a column at high speed, hitting an acceleration of roughly five to eight times that of gravity.

Court says that Michigan doesn’t need to provide quality public education: When education is not valued, society fails. Neither the people nor the country can thrive, much less survive without a good education.

Thought for Friday through Monday:

Some Americans who never trust their govt tend to be the ones who trust it completely whenever an unarmed black person is shot & killed.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) November 25, 2014

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 23, 2014

What to be thankful for this week? No Benghazi. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-CA) and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee concluded the Benghazi affair by finding that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees. So, there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.

A few things that will come up this week: First, the Grand Jury in Ferguson will finally give us the slow “He didn’t kill Michael Brown” decision. Who knows what will happen then. Tory Russell, co-founder of resistance group Hands Up United, Ferguson, MO said:

How can I prepare kids for the world if I’m not preparing the world for the kids?

Next, we could have a decision on Iran’s nuclear program. If the P5+1 make a deal with Iran, it will transform the Middle East. Don’t hold your Thanksgiving dinner waiting for it to happen. Finally, the mud wrestling in Washington will continue.

Immigration has always involved executive orders:

Why are Republicans so upset about Immigration?

Here’s why: They now have a very safe majority in the House, and an unsafe, but possibly sustainable majority in the Senate. If they actually pass an immigration bill, they will be primaried from the right in many of their less-than-safe House districts. So, the posturing about Obama being a “king” and “shredding the Constitution”.

Calls for meeting in the middle are meaningless:

Keystone and Immigration may be intimately connected:

Manson family values meets Cosby family values:

California Caught in Moral Dilemma

Many have heard about California’s overcrowded prisons. In fact, conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, so ruled the US Supreme Court in 2011. That led to an order to expand California’s parole programs. But the state resisted the order, using two arguments: First, that they won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs. Second, that cheap prison labor is essential to the state’s budget.

The arguments center on a state program that uses inmates to fight wildfires. California is one of several states that employ prison labor to fight wildfires, and it has the largest firefighter program. According to Buzzfeed, prison inmates are paid less than $2 per day, and California will save $1 billion by using prison labor rather than hiring firefighters. Only certain classes of nonviolent inmates charged with lower level offenses are eligible for the inmate firefighter program. They must then meet physical and other criteria.

In exchange, inmates get the opportunity for early release, by earning twice as many credits toward early release as non-firefighting inmates otherwise earn, known as 2-for-1 credits. In February, the federal court overseeing California’s prison litigation ordered the state to expand this 2-for-1 program to some other rehabilitation programs so that other inmates who exhibit good behavior and perform certain work successfully would also be eligible for even earlier release.

Think Progress reported that California’s actions to slow-roll the court’s orders raises questions about whether using prison labor at the expense of private labor, creates incentives to keep inmates in prison, particularly when the courts have already said that many of them don’t need to be there. This doesn’t pass the smell test. Is the purpose of imprisonment to punish and/or rehabilitate, or is it to make money for the state? Is it ethical to do both? Is it ethical to keep prisoners incarcerated longer than the courts require because we can make money on their backs?

To make California’s argument even more repulsive, they apparently need more prisoners to make more money. Yet they can’t be bothered to build facilities sufficient to take care of those already in the system.

Does anyone seriously think it is cheaper to pay an imprisoned firefighter than to pay a private firefighter? That makes economic sense only when the state looks just at the $2 per day that the inmate is paid, compared to the cost of a full-time (union member) firefighter. They should be comparing it to keeping the inmate in prison for the minimum sentence of his/her term, since many of these prisoners would paroled under the Court’s order. California says that the annual cost of keeping someone in a state prison is $49,000. BTW, the typical pay for a beginning California temp firefighter for the wildfire season is $15,240. And, if the money were moved from pot A to pot B, those inmate seasonal firefighters could be hired upon release. That would create more competition for those seasonal firefighting jobs.

Prison labor has been with us since the beginning. It built our farm-to-market roads in the early days of the automobile. It stamped our license plates. Today, it picks up some of our litter and fights some of our fires and harvests some of our crops. Prison labor, whether in firefighter garb, orange jumpsuits, or chains, will remain.

It is our ethics as a people that seems to be going away for a long stay in a concrete room.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Civil Rights