By Mansfield Frazier
“This” being one of the columns I know full well in advance is going to cause consternation bordering on opprobrium towards me from some quarters of the community; a few folks will no doubt be looking for a rope with which to string me up with, or a rail to ride me out of town on … but so be it, I’m cool with that.
Allow me to elucidate: Due to my involvement with the urban agriculture movement, I was invited to a high level planning meeting where decisions in regards to which direction a number of issues vital to the region would be bantered about. When I got to the meeting and was the only person of color there out of the 20 or so individuals in attendance I thought, “Ah-ha! So this is how the game is played … this is how we black folks lose out; we’re not invited to the decision-making table.” I was quietly seething.
Seething that is, until I was proven wrong: Black folks indeed were invited, a number of them … it’s just that they all were late, every goddamn one of them. And I’m not talking about a few minutes late, oh no. My seething was quietly replaced by sheepishness. And here’s the kicker: I’ve been in other meetings with most of these black folks on numerous prior occasions … and they’ve been late every goddamn time!
Now, this is not to say white folks are never late … of course they are; some make (or made) a career out of it, but Jimmy Dimora is now stepping off a big bid in a federal joint. Now I’m not suggesting there was any connection between his constant tardiness and his getting broke down like a double-barreled shotgun and loaded up … but ‘ya know, I’m just sayin’.
Now, what I’ve just stated will cause some to say I’ve “washed our (our being black folks) dirty linen in public” — that’s why some will want to get that rope or rail. And, while this article might be embarrassing to some, those constantly late black folk don’t give a good goddamn about embarrassing me with their lateness, now do they?
Do these constantly late individuals really think no one is taking notice of their routine tardiness? No, their juvenile behavior certainly is noticed, and gives those who wield real power all the reason they need to be dismissive of these children posing as adults. Indeed, why do these morons think anyone will take them seriously if they can’t even act mature enough to learn the simple task of telling time … and then take punctuality seriously?
There’s an old saying in the black community that we, as persons of color, have to be better than our white counterparts just to get the simple respect we deserve — and rightly or wrongly that’s true. Some black folks just have to grow up and learn to live with it.
Now, I’m asking all of my loyal readers who know the kind of folks I’m referencing (actually, be they black or white) to do me a favor and print this article out and send it to them anonymously. By asking others to do this I gain a bit of cover, so that when I send it to certain folks they won’t know (or at least can’t prove) it came from me … since I’m really not fond of ropes or rails. Thanks.
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“That” being the so-called War on Drugs, and how it continues to subvert our culture, erode our liberties, and, as the old saying goes, “If you’re not concerned then it means you’re not paying close enough attention.”
According to an article on Reuters, “A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.”
This so-called “war” is now turning inwards. Americans by and large have not been concerned with how debasing and destabilizing our efforts to stem the tide of drugs entering the country has been (and continues to be) on other countries, but now it seems as if chickens are coming home to roost.
The article continues, “Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
“The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to ‘recreate’ the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.”
Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011 said, “I have never heard of anything like this at all.” Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers. “It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
Indeed they are, and here’s why: Money. Law enforcement has come up with a way to enrich their agencies and departments, so they really are not trying to win the “war” … just get fat off of it.
The progressive blog ThinkProgress recently posted an article that ties it all together.
It says, in part, “As law enforcement officers continue to ramp up use of a controversial practice known as civil forfeiture, police are seizing cash, cars, houses, and other assets in the name of drug enforcement without ever having arrested or charged their owners with a crime. Funds collected from these seizures frequently go directly back into law enforcement, creating a dangerous profit incentive for police and other law enforcers. Both the New Yorker and ProPublica have new investigations of this practice, in which officers seize property they believe is connected to drug or other illicit activity, with a much lower burden of proof than when charges are filed against a person.”
The one thing law enforcement has depended on is for the average citizen to take the position of: “These are law breaking drug dealers, what does that have to do with me?” As the combined articles so aptly point out, these shady practices have gotten so good to the DEA and others they’re now expanding on them to include additional citizens, even those not under suspicion of drug dealing … at some point, that might even include you.
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“The Other” is the sickening case of former Pennsylvania Judges Mark A. Ciavarella, 63, and Michael Conahan, 61, who came up with a neat little scheme to earn a little pin money on the side. They got in cahoots with a privately-run juvenile prison, PA Child Care, and the two of them received more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to insure the facility stayed on full.
Here’s how the scheme unfolded: In January of 2008, Conahan became president judge of Luzerne County, PA, and used his budgetary discretion to stop funding the county public youth detention facility, leaving Ciavarella free to send kids to the private lockup. And he was brutal … he would sentence offenders with small offenses to months and, at times, years behind bars. He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal, and in another case sentenced a teen to 90 days in jail after a simple schoolyard fight.
And if you guessed that most of the youth so victimized were teens of color, you’d be right.
In 2011, Ciavarella went to trial and lost, and was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison, while Conahan got 17 years because he pleaded out. Once Ciavarella was convicted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out 4,000 convictions issued by the judge. Ciavarella appealed his conviction to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, and last week the court denied his request for a new trial and ordered him to begin serving his sentence in a federal prison.
Is this case, as the private prison industry seeks to assure the public, an anomaly? Not by a long shot. It’s just that police, lawmakers, prosecutors and judges in states with a strong private prison industry presence are usually more circumspect in regards to how they keep our nation’s prisons the most crowded in the world. It’s done in the name of the great god “Profit” (which, by the way, is the true religion of the plundering Plutocrats on the far right) and the industry is gaining a foothold in Ohio.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.