Profiled + Punished: Criminal Justice, Race and Society (Room 9204)
Across the country, communities of color are under siege by government enforcement agencies. Immigrants face an increasing number of deportations and are making up a larger portion of people in prison. They join black and brown prisoners whose felony records leave them disenfranchised. Learn how these communities are fighting back from the rise of the felony rights movement to the Chicago sanctuary campaign to block a young mother’s deportation.
Moderator - Sandip Roy, New America Media
Patricia Watkins, Target Area Development Corporation, Developing Justice Coalition
Ema Lozano, Pueblo Sin Fronteras
Xochitl Bervera, Independent artist
Notes:
Workshop Recap:
Alternative Media vs Mainstream Media: Most issues are similar in media, but when it comes to immigration issues the mainstream media wants the sob story about the “good immigrant”, the one that tells the story of one immigrant who was deported, but did not have a criminal record.
Patricia: TARGET Area Development Corporation started as a planning organization helping with community involvement in urban planning. It did not take long, however, to see that the people in power were keeping the community in disarray as a form of control. The organization brought to light the issues that were affecting the people and immediately was kicked out of the inner circle of community workings. This led the organization to engage in grassroots organizing, community surveying, and leadership development.
Public safety issues which were spurred by drug crimes, mass incarceration, and recidivism were the biggest problems. The people in power wanted more cops in the neighborhood, but the community learned through research and evaluation of program activities that this strategy alone could not protect their community.
- According to a Chicago Urban League and University of Wisconsin report, 55% of adult Black males in Chicago have felony records.
- Moreover, according to a 2002 Human Rights Watch report, in Illinois, Black males are imprisoned for drug offenses at a rate of 57 times of their white counterparts (57 black men for every 1 white male). The organization saw the drain on social, economic, and human capital caused by mass incaceration and the tremendous gains of downstate white prison towns. The comunity came to understand that Black children had become the raw material for the prison system industry. The community wanted the money diverted back to the neighborhood to help returnees reintegrate.
- 44,000 people go in to prison and 42,000 come out to Illinouis communities every year. These people are barred out of housing, health care, education, work etc. Twenty-five percent of the prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Drugs however continue to flow freely in some neighborhoods. The community came to understand that other people in power are protecting the drug trade and as a result, they escort drugs into the neighborhood, and nobody seems to be able to anything about it--including the cops, FBI, CIA, ATF, and Special Operations.
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The Developing Justice Coalition believes that increased incarceration is a fickle attempt to make communities safer, especially since 97% of those incarcerated return home and the fact that larger issues fuel these phenomena. They focus on advocating to increase public safety in the community by reforming drug sentencing laws, incresing treatment opportunities for those that want to be free, developing a stsewide state-sanctioned reintegration plan for exoffenders and highly affected neighborhoods, and providing stree-level intervention to help mconnect disconnected youth and adults into employment and school opportunities.
They beleive the state should start by provding social service and economic support to communities that receive large numbers of returning ex-offenders; education and job training for prisoners that will reenter within a few years; and street-level intervention services to help connect high-risk individuals into employment, education, community, and civic engagement. With this angle the push for cops in the community is also reduced. They helped develop and pass Senate Bill 3007 which seals the records of low-level drug offenders so they can reenter the emplyment field. Currently, they are advocating for the SMART Act, a drug diversion bill that would push treatment ioptions in lieu of prison records for non-violent low-level drug offenders. DJC wants to stop the mass incarceration, the cycle of recidivism, and custom of stockpiling citizens in the prisons, instead of diverting those that can be helped.
Emma: In 1983, Rudy Lozano (brother) was assassinated. Rudy was extremely active in creating unity between Latinos and African Americans. Emma works with Latino immigrants; undocumented Mexicans in particular.
The case of Elvira Arellano- defied a direct order from Homeland Security to be deported and separated from her four-year-old son. She was an airport worker with a false SSN. Most people were detained and/or deported but she fought back with lawyers. She worked on immigrant rights and because she became publicly undocumented she couldn’t work. She was hired by Pueblos Sin Fronteras. She fought for legalization for all undocumented workers and lobbied with Senator Durban to push this bill. He instead pushed for the DREAM Act. She confronted him with the fact that she was not fighting for herself, but for all undocumented workers. Durban stopped pushing for the bill that she proposed.
All the billions of dollars the govt spends on HATE, Arellano has been able to do so much with just one single act of defiance. PSF only hires people that have been in the struggle and who continue to struggle.
Xochitl: In 2000 there was a project by a legal organization along with youth justice advocates against the Tallulah, LA juvenile prison. The charge was around access to health care- many juveniles were getting hurt in prison, and prison authorities wanted to get a health clinic at the prison so the juveniles didn’t have to leave the prison to access health cares for their broken bones. In 2001-2003 the same collaboration of parties fought to close down the prison.
Juvenile Justice reform Act of 2003.
The issues around prisons in LA: 2,000 young people in 2000 in the prison system has been reduced to 500 juveniles now. LA now has only 3 juvenile prisons since 2 prisons were shut down. There are mostly African-American children who worked on plantations that now are in the prison system. Prison towns have deterred other types of industry. The prisons are located near the high schools and middle schools, so the children see them and think that’s the end of the road for them. Xochitl and other are now advocating to convert the former prisons into community colleges.
Xochitl and colleagues have partnered after Katrina and Rita with Safe Streets, … (Indigent Defense). Children have no legal representation if they are immigrants. After the storm, many immigrants were detained at the city jail. They were not evacuated during the storm. They were sent to upper levels of the building but nobody evacuated them. They were terrified for their lives so they busted iron bars and cement until they finally were evacuated by boat. At the time of evacuation the water had reached to their necks. They were then sent to other jails in other towns and families did not know where they were.
In 2006 there were thousands of people who had never seen a lawyer and never seen a judge. Detained illegally, no one knows where they are or where their papers are. Needed a public defenders system because it didn’t exist after Katrina and Rita.
In the media: Judges decided to start letting people go and the frame of story in the media became “…soon judges are letting murderers and rapist back out into the street!”. Xochitl’s goal was to combat this framework by finding out why these people were detained in the first place. She asked these people when was the last time they had seen a lawyer. Of 102 interviews conducted, none had seen a lawyer. The average time of their detention was 365 days which showed that they were detained before Katrina and Rita and still had not seen a lawyer. This implied that the fact that did not see a lawyer was not because of the aftermath of the storm. Xochitl fought for a community legal public defenders organization.
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