Welcome everybody. My name is Jodi Siegel and I coordinate our
book program at Green River and it's great to have you all here
today. Thank you so much for joining us. This is our
inaugural presentation of the year for our 2021 one book and
our focus again this year is on the US carceral system, and
injustice we're reading two titles, we're reading becoming Miss Burton.
I have copies of our books here from prison to recovery to leading
the fight for incarcerated women and who are reading
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. If you're a current GRC student and
would like a copy of the book, you can shoot us an email over
at circdesk@greenriver.edu and you can also follow this
link at the bottom of the screen here. For more information about
our one book program.
And then I just want to give you a little heads up on upcoming
things on the next things happening this fall quarter for
the one book program, and I want to say this is a huge
collaboration with other groups on campus. Other people on
campus, so we're coordinating some of our presentations with
the educational. With the diversity educational series. So
in a week we have a black lives matter presentation with Nikita
Oliver or in two weeks we have the juvenile prison pipeline
coming up with our criminal justice faculty member Jashon
Banks and guest James Curtis. We have a visit we're going to have
this presentation from Jeremiah
Bourgeois. As part again of our diversity educational series.
And then finally, this quarter will be having a talk. Another
one of these lunchtime talks with that will be led by Mark
Barrington from our English Department, and he'll be having
the conversation with the Co founders of FEPS their Freedom
Education Project of Puget Sound and that will be in the middle
of November. So again, if you'd like to get a copy of our book,
please do reach out to start desk. If you have questions, you
can shoot me an email.
And you can find my email.
On that one book page that I provided the link to an. Again,
I'm Jodi Siegel and.
There's so much more to say about this topic, but consider
this first presentation on mass incarceration to be our launch
into a year long conversation on
the US. Carceral system there's so many so many different
aspects to this and we hope you'll join in. So with that I'm
going to turn it over to Kate Lawson Rogers sociology faculty
member and thank you so much Kate for leading us off this
year. -Of course, and thank you so much for having me. I'm
really excited to be spending this next hour with our students
and other faculty in our
community. It's been interesting times right, and we've been
through a whole lot before I start. Kind of talking about
some of the reasons for mass incarceration, I wanted just to
share with you a little bit about my experience and how I
started studying this and looking into this around the
year of 2008. I was just like many of you. I was a criminology
student at Cal Poly Pomona. Sitting through these
introductory classes and I just couldn't believe what I was
hearing and learning.
On in terms of what was happening in our criminal
justice system, it was really alarming to me.
And I think what has been really, really disheartening in
in terms of time and everything. Is that now that I'm a professor
of Criminology, alot of my lectures are very similar to
what I was learning 15 years ago, and we've seen very little
systemic change. And so you know, I know that times are
tough right now, and there's a lot of tension on our community.
But I'm really pleased that we're having these
conversations. If you've taken one of my sociology classes, you
know this is one of the things I'm always like. We gotta talk
about this. Because when we're looking at things from a
sociological lens, there's so much more to consider and
unpacked, and really a sociologist our main goal is to
kind of peel back the layers to gain some understanding. And so
today we're going to be looking at some of the social forces,
the economic forces and the political forces that kind of
helped shaped our mass incarceration in our criminal
justice system in general because within our rugged,
individualistic culture, we have this idea that, you know.
You do the crime. You do the time without really considering
that you know there's actually some major systemic problems
within what's going on.
I also want to talk about the idea that it's you know you are
really important piece of this puzzle. When you know education
is really important as well because so many of these tough
on crime policies were actually voted on by citizens right? And
voted on repeatedly sometimes and a lot of that is based on
our fear that we have in round crime. But hopefully this
presentation really kind of create some clarity for you in
terms of kind of how we got here
at and. You know there's so many forces going on, so with that I
want to go ahead and kind of share my screen with you and
we'll go ahead and get started.
Alright, so here we are. So the title of this process,
presentation and mass incarceration in the land of the
free. Actually I should start the slideshow rate.
OK, gotta make it big there. So I'm just a little
outline of what we're going to be going over in terms of this
kind of presentations day. The first thing we're going to be
doing is defining institutional racism. I'm going to be
providing you with some examples of institutional racism that
we've seen throughout history were going to be identifying,
discussing factors that have led to mass incarceration in the US
and its impact on Black Indigenous and people of color.
We're going to be looking at outcomes associated with the war
on drugs and tough on crime.
Policies. And I'm going to hopefully explain how mass
incarceration is a continuation of past systems of racialized
oppression. So I want to start off by talking about
institutional racism. Part of the reason I think we need to
kind of be clear about this is generally when we think about
races. Then we think about racism on a more interpersonal
kind of level we think of oh, this person is a racist. This
cop or this teacher is a racist, but institutional racism
is actually significantly different. What we're saying
here is racism is really set up in the system. I always tell my
students systems do what they've been set up to do.
But we're saying, essentially, you know, it's embedded in the
system. The system was set up this way, so I really like this
definition from solid ground. They define institutional
racism as a systemic distribution of resources, power
and opportunity in society to benefit people who are white at
the exclusion of people of
color. There have been various examples of institutionalized
racism through our past. You know, some of these you've
probably heard before slavery was one of the more egregious
systems. It was a closed system. It was incredibly brutal, and,
you know, I want to remind students that you know the law
was on the side of the slave owner. If you had a runaway
slave, you could call on Law enforcement, they come, get them for
you. And so it's pretty easy to see with this one.
Thought it was embedded in the laws. It was embedded in the
culture. And the next example will look at it was Jim Crow and
Jim Crow was a real reaction to the ending of slavery and the
continuation of racial control for especially African
Americans. Jim Crow took place from the 1870s to the 1960s, so
I had about 100 year rain. We look at, you know, this idea of
what was called separate but equal where local laws really
reinforce racial segregation. This is where we saw the
separate drinking fountains, separate schools, separate
bathrooms, separate restaurants.
And we know that things were not equal. Again, languages can be
really powerful, but it wasn't. Equal blacks were relegated to
some of the poorest conditions. Another example throughout
history is Redlining. Redlining took place in the 1930s to
around the 1960s, and this is where the federal government
wouldn't write home loans in certain areas. And generally
these were areas where people of color were living an why. This
was really meaningful, especially at the time, as it
leaves people in a cycle of rentership, right?
Where it never allows people to build the intergenerational
wealth that whites have been able to build. Believe it or
not, you know people make a lot of money off the equity in their
homes lot more sometimes than getting up and going to work.
But when home loans weren't written in these sections, it
really kept people in this
cycle rentership. Lastly the one will be looking at today is Mass
Incarceration and will be looking at some of the policies
and how they've been kind of a racialized throughout history.
You know, it's interesting 'cause I was just reading an
article this morning about
George Floyd and. It's really sad. You know when you look at
George for Floyd's life, his great grand father was a slave.
They lived in the South. They were part of this great
migration. Moving to other areas for a better life. They lived in
segregated areas that had lots of poverty and then you see him
also impacted by kind of the system as well. And so you start
to see that these are layers upon layers upon layers that are
really coming to impact individuals in very harsh ways.
So as we come to talk about mass incarceration, it's really
important to address some of the reasons why we had such an
increase in incarceration rates.
This really started with the war on drugs that was initiated by
Richard Nixon. It's interesting because that that I'm only about
2% of Americans identify drugs as a major issue. What we find
is that Nixon did a really good job of using tough on crime and
war on drugs as a political strategy to gain votes, and this
is a pattern that we see with a lot of politicians. It makes
them look instrumental. It makes them look like they're doing
something and it really, you know, is based in that fear that
we have of Crime.
We've seen it, you know, throughout history, even our
last election, we had our president saying, well, I'll
build you a wall and protect you from rapists and murderers. So
this is a political strategy that's been going on for a long
time. And this, you know, in total, you know it increased the
prison population by 700% to give you a global perspective.
We're about 4% of the world's population, but we incarcerate
about 25% of the world's
prisoners. So we definitely are an outlier and really abnormal
in terms of the rest of the world. In total we have about
2.3 million people incarcerated. That does not include people who
are on probation or parole. That would include more like 7
million people. This also comes out a huge fiscal costs where
the cost of incarceration and averages about $31,000 per
inmate. So the war on drugs started with Nixon. We saw it
turned more into a literal war with President Reagan. Reagan
militarized the police, we saw armored cars. We saw SWAT teams
breaking down doors.
And then we also saw amplified around the 1990s with Clinton's
crime bill, right? So these are some of the reasons why we
started to see this huge huge increase. Another important kind
of point that we need to look at would be what's known as
recidivism. An recidivism is this idea of people reentering
in the system once they've been released. Although we call
ourselves corrections and real abilitation, we're not really
doing much rehabilitation. If you look at the numbers.
So the recidivism rates for inmates within three years or
67% within three years. 67% of those people will be back
through those doors within five years. Those numbers, or 77%. So
if you've heard the criminal justice system being referred to
as revolving door, it definitely is, right? You have people
cycling in and cycling out. You know some of the reasons why we
see these high recidivism rates really look at other
institutional barriers that
we're seeing. On a lot of job applications, people have to
work, check that box that you're convicted felon. I'm sure we can
all imagine that this does not fair well for the job surge and
a lot of apartment applications. You have to do the same thing.
We know the previously incarcerated or justice involves
they also they can't get things like educational grants.
Sometimes they can't get access to Section 8 housing. Often
times a lot of the issues that they were having that put them
in jail like mental health issues or drug issues or never
fully addressed. And you know.
Their attics is very difficult, so they go back into these
systems. They also get put back into the same areas, often times
where they were getting into trouble. So as grim is a lot of
this seems I will say we are currently seeing a one to two
and one to 2% annual decrease in incarceration rates, and so I'm
really hoping we're going to continue on with those
reductions. It's a really, really important things would be
thinking about so.
Now we're going to kind of look at how mass incarceration really
came to impact people of color at much more disproportionate
rates. Here you'll see if you look at that kind of middle or
first row here. Men were disproportionately impacted, but
especially black men. One in three, black men can expect to
spend some time in the system at some point in their life, which
is just incredible, you know, within state prisons we see
black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites.
Some of the reasons for this how to do with racial profiling, but
also things like the influence of the media. I remember as a
kid growing up in the 80s. So much of what we are seeing in
the media was, you know, black urbanites committing crimes that
were shows like cops, and so it was really perpetuating these
ideas that we've seen throughout history of the black male is
criminal and so that really kind
of shapes. Our perceptions and really fueled fear that
especially white people had. And again, we're living in
segregated areas, so we don't even know these people.
So we saw that, but we saw very little explanation put on things
like structural disadvantages, things like poverty and
unemployment housing some of the things that you know, pull
people out of these. I always tell students when people are
left out of the main economic systems like they can't find
jobs. They create their own. It's a form of survival and so
you see this in all countries,
right? So? It's understandable, right? It's a form of survival,
but we rarely put attention on this type of stuff. When we
are, you know, it's really that rugged individualism you do the
crime you do the time. So now I want to show a video really
quick. That kind of illustrate some of this points. It's
pretty short. It's only three minutes. It's done by Jay-Z and
I really like it. I do have to kind of it's not going to work
on this. There's been some issues with that, but I'm going
to share my screen.
In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan
doubled down on the war on drugs that have been
started by Richard Nixon. In 1971, drugs were bad, fried
your brain and drug dealers with monsters, so reason
neighborhoods in major cities
were failing. No one want to talk about Reaganomics in the
ending of social safety nets the defunding of schools in
the loss of jobs in cities
across America. Young men like me who has who became a soul
villain and drug addicts lack moral fortitude in the 1990s
incarceration rates in the US blew up. Today we imprison more
people than any other country in the world. China, Russia, Iran,
Cuba, all countries we consider autocratic and repressive. Yeah,
more than them, judges hands were tired by tough on crime
laws and they were forced to hand out mandatory life
sentences with simple possession and low level drug sales.
My home state of New York started this with Rockefeller
laws. Then the feds make distinctions between people who
sold powder cocaine and crack cocaine, even though they were
the same drug. Only difference is how you take it. And even
though white people used and so crack more than black, people
somehow was black people who went to prison. The media
ignored actual data to this day, crackers still talked about as a
black problem. The NYPD, rated are Brooklyn neighborhoods, while
Manhattan bankers openly used cope with impunity. The war on
drugs exploded. the US prison
population disproportionately. Backing away, black and Latinos
are prison. Population grew more than 900% when the war on drugs
began. In 1971, our prison population was 200,000. Today it
is over 2 million long after the crack ever ended, we continued
our war on drugs. There are more than 1.5 million drug arrests in
2014, more than 80% were for possession only. Almost half
were for marijuana. People are finally talking about treating
addiction to harder drugs as a
health crisis. But there's no compassionate language about
drug dealers, unless of course we're talking about places like
Colorado who stayed. Economy got a huge boost by the above ground
marijuana industry. Afew state South in Louisiana, there still
handing out mandatory sentence is for people who sell weed in
spite of booming it celebrated 50 billion legal marijuana
industry. Most they still disproportionately handout
mandatory senses to black and Latinos with drug cases, if you're
entrepreneurial living. One of the many states that are passing
legalized laws. You may still face barriers. Participating in an
above ground economy. Venture capitalists migrate to the
states to open multibillion dollar operations, but former
felons can't open a dispensary lots of times those felonies
with drug charges caught by poor people who sold drugs for a
living but are now prohibited from participating in one of the
fastest growing economies. Got it and states like New York,
withholding marijuana is no longer grounds for arrest.
Police issue possession citations in black and Latino
neighborhoods at a far higher rate than other neighborhoods.
Kids in Crown Heights are constantly stopped and ticketed
for trees. Kids at dorms in Colombia with rates of marijuana
use are equal to or worse than those in the hood, are never
targeted or ticketed rates of drug use are as high as they were.
When Nixon declared this so called war in 1971, 45 years
later, it's time to rethink our policies and laws. The war drugs
is an epic fail.
Alright, so here we are, so hopefully that you know just
created more of an understanding of how of this stuff came about.
OK, so now what I'm going to do is we're going to talk about
some of the policies that created mass incarceration and
also how again why certain groups were targeted at much
higher rates. And that's what we came to see. Is that really in
the criminal justice system? Whites seems to get a pass almost
at every stage, so the first thing I want to talk about our
sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. So
what's important to note about crack and powder cocaine is that.
You know crack is essentially a derivative of powder. Powder is
its purest form, crack is made. You add baking soda. You add
water and you add heat and it crystallizes into a little rock.
But what's in also really important in understanding kind
of punishments associated with the two is that there are almost
the same thing but in fact crack users were facing a much harsher
penalty for their drug use and they were more likely to be
black and Brown people. Powder
cocaine was more likely to be used by white middle class upper
class people on Wall Street and things like that, but what was
significant in terms of sentencing is crack users under the anti-drug
abuse act of 1986. Crack users. There was a racial or
ratio of 100 to 1 meaning you have to have 100 times the
amount of powder cocaine is cracked to receive the same
sentence. So think about that someone like if you were pulled
over you would need 500 grams of
powder cocaine. To receive the same sentence as 5 grams, and
it's interesting because a lot of this was based on that
demonization of the crack user, right, that they were Hillary
Clinton, called them super predators and then just like
just to kind of juxtapose that we see powder cocaine is almost
glamorized within the culture. We see it in Film Studio 54
boogie nights, right? This like? Oh, this is what white people do
right? And so it's really interesting how you can look at
one drug with very little difference. Kind of chemically.
And how you know it turned out so differently for so many
people? So that was a huge one. It wasn't until the Obama
administration in 2010 that they changed this ratio to 18 to one.
It was so criticized for being like. Why is there a ratio at
all? But we saw huge influx of crack users put into the system.
Under these penalties, the next one will talk about is plea
bargains an I like to talk about plea bargains because I think a
lot of times our perception of the criminal justice system is.
There's a fair trial and you get a jury of your peers.
But that's absolutely not the case. In fact, according to Pew
Research Center, in 97% of federal cases ended up in a
plea, and it was 94% of state cases ended up in a plea. And
what you're doing with a plea bargain is, essentially, you're
pleading guilty to a lesser offense. But that doesn't mean
that you get this whole. You know someone to really look at
the case and what it comes to do. Is it really comes to?
You know it, it ends up being a classist system where people who
have money who are more likely to be white can hire you. Know
good attorneys to represent them. Families can help, but if
you're poor and a person of color, oftentimes you're looking
at a public defender who has huge caseload and you know we
can become a really kind of troubling system. But I also
want to mention that our system was never intended to process as
many cases. There have been criticisms that sometimes public
defenders are working alongside
of prosecutors. And not doing what's best for their their
clients, and so you know this is again a real reason why those
with the resources are going to fare a lot better. The Next One
is mandatory minimums, and what management minimums did
where they sent mandatory sentences for first offenses. I
think this is really important. We just talked about, especially
in understanding kind of what we're talking about. We just
talked about crack and powder cocaine. So during this time
your first drug offense so that 5 grams of crack would get you
five years in prison.
Think about how long that is and this is for your first offense.
These aren't season drug dealers. This is your first
offense. Think about how you know what a different space you
are then now than you were five years ago and how you know
uprooted people would be from.
From their lives, once the you know they are in prison for five
years and then facing the stigma and and all of the things that
we talked about once they get
out. And so just really, really important, these mandatory
minimums were really, really extreme. They took away
discretion from judges, you know, judge couldn't go hey wait
a minute, this kids are really good kid. He just got kind of.
He did made a mistake, right? These people were really defined
by their first mistakes.
The Next One will look at is truth in sentencing, and truth
in sentencing really elongated the prison sentence. So it
essentially said hey, you're actually going to serve that
sentence. You're given that mandatory minimum, right? Or at
least 85% of it. So it really took out incentives for good
behavior. It took off, so it
Really extended the traditional stay in the prison. We can also
look at three strikes. This is a pretty complex one because we
have three strikes in various States and they were all
different. So I'm just going to talk about it in general terms,
but it's really based on kind about baseball. 3 strikes and
your out. It said that three serious crimes or felony
convictions would lead you to 25 years to life, but what a lot of
people didn't realize, especially in my home state of
California, where they voted on
this three times. People kept saying Yeah keep doing it keep
doing it was that you could actually get two felonies with
one crime and that your last crimes and actually need to be a
felony. It could be a misdemeanor and in some states
you have people actually serving 25 years to life when there
there there last crime was there's a story of a guy
stealing pizza or videotapes.
And so we are. You know, it's really impactful in terms of
people of color's research shows that prosecutors are twice as
likely to preserve oh one second I'm reading the wrong one. In 2016,
70% of Americans serving life sentences for three strikes in
federal prisons were African American, and so again, this
came to impact people color at very high rates, but also just
to take a step back and realize we have people serving life
sentences for drugs.
And you know, sometimes murderers get out depending on
who they murder, right? But is that something that we feel like
is deserving? It's that's all. Kind of more of a personal
thing, but I think are perceptions along, you know
these types of people are a little bit different because as
we saw this increase in mass incarceration, 50% of those
people were nonviolent drug offenders. Not these violent
criminals that we've been kind of told about the last policy. I
want to look at is stop and frisk, and this happens in New
York. And again, this was this allowed for things like racial
profiling, but stop and frisk allowed for law enforcement to
stop people who looks suspicious and frisk them and pull out their
pockets. Hey, what do you have
on you? When they look back at the data years later, they found
that 53% of people that were stopped in New York City were
black, 31% or Hispanic, which was incredibly disproportionate
to their numbers in the population were together they
comprise about 37% of the population, and so these are all
kind of some factors that have obviously led to this increase
in mass incarceration, but also have come to really
disproportionately impact people of color. So let's go ahead and
move on. What I want you to see is that you know within
sociology we really we look at history because history has
these patterns that we can look at and what I want you to see
with this following video is that you know racialized drug
laws. This is nothing new and sometimes you know sometimes it
has to do with race. But there are other factors that are
influencing it. Things like economic factors, which is what
you're going to see in this next video here. So let's go ahead
and watch the that.
In the 1800s, certain kinds of drugs that are illicit today
were common in this country. Cocaine was widely used, heroin,
people using drugs. It was something that was just
ordinarily accepted opium, for example, which used by middle
age. Successful whites, often Housewives in the South.
If people were addicted or abusing drugs, they were viewed
sympathetically, as people had to be helped. It was seen as a
public health issue rather than a crime issue. What are the
first changes was on the West coast when smoking opium was
made? The criminal offence. Now why would opium smoking be
illegal in California but not in Mississippi? What was going on
in California? There was a concern about smoking opium
well. As it turns out, it had nothing to do with opium itself.
The concern was with the people associated with smoking opium
and that was the Chinese.
It would come to this country and many of whom were in
California, working hard, working for very little pay and
becoming part of the American success story. But their success
was taking jobs away from white workers. So politicians got
together and decided I gotta find something about the Chinese
for which they can be criminalised to get them out of
the way. Now, of course, you can't throw people in jail
simply because their Chinese, but you can throw him in jail
because they smoke opium.
In the same way we saw things going on with cocaine again, it
was middle aged. Successful people in this country, business
executives, physicians, Housewives, all perfectly legal.
But then around the turn of the century, cocaine began being
associated with Blacks. They could withstand police Bullets.
That was thought they can work hard all day, all night long and
all day long, again threatening the jobs of white workers. And
so laws began to be passed
against cocaine. You're not arresting these people
officially because they're black. You're resting them
because they've committed some sort of drug violation.
Next, of course we see it and change in reputation that
hemp has had hemp as a legitimate crop from colonial
times forward. A widely appreciated commercial
product, but then in the 1930s hemp changed into
something vicious and fearsome called marijuana.
Because at that time marijuana smoking was being
associated with Mexicans working hard working cheep,
and once again what was being outlawed must not be in
Mexican, but just some habit associated with Mexicans.
These laws set up a very dangerous president of
racial control.
OK. So hopefully that created some clarity for you in terms of
patterns that we've seen throughout history and how you
know there can be really important economic forces that
are pushing a lot of this as well, and to kind of tie this
all in. We have to look at the economic forces that are
contributing to mass incarceration today. For one, we
have private prisons. About 8% of our prison popper or prisons
are for profit run for profit prisons producing billions of
dollars in revenue. The GEO Group last year produced 3.9
billion dollars in revenue. You know? And then what's also
important is that you have people with a vested interest in
maintaining these systems, right? You have entire towns
were being employed by these prisons and they go.
I don't want you guys to shut down. I need this job.
And so people's really start having a stake in this. We also
see the for profit prisons are lobbying Congress to continue
these tough on crime policies because this is their bread and
butter. This is how they make their money. We've also seen
them move into the ICE detention centers. Those are being run by
profit by these. Same for profit industries and so there are
economic forces that are pushing this as well. There's also an
entire prison industry products that are made. It's always
amazing to me.
So many of these brands and companies that we use everyday
have used prison labor. And of course, prison labor is sense to
the dollar, so it's all for profit. Starbucks had cups made
in one state. Idaho potatoes had prisoners digging their
potatoes. Wendy's. I mean there was just so many Victoria's
Secret. They were making panties in the prisons. It's quite
amazing, but you start to see that you know if we look at
these pictures here.
We can start to see the parallel this is, you know, economic
exploitation of groups of same groups of people throughout
history. So with that I know things can look very, very grim.
I want to remind you they are getting better right? We are
seeing a 1 to 2% reduction annually so that's really
exciting, but I wanted to share with you and I'm excited for
what Prison Reform is looking looking like here and reform.
This means change what we're starting to see an even having
these conversations so so important in producing these
types of change. So the first one is replacing bail with pre-
trial services. If you consider bail, it's very classest right?
You can get out
If you have the money in order to get out. So what this
what this does is it replaces replaces bail with the pre trial
we're offering. They don't have to stay in prison or jail while
they're awaiting trial, but they're getting things like
mental health treatment. They're getting treatment referrals for
drug and mental health court date reminders, home visits.
What's really amazing? They at least they looked at Yakima and
Spokane, and they found that re offense rates are lower when
these are replaced with when Bail is replaced with pre trial
services. It's also much cheaper because we're not housing them,
so that's one thing I'm really excited about and I just want to
give a shout out to Green River because we're actually right now
working on being part of these pre trial services.
And where you know, hey, do you want to get your GED? Do you
want to go to school? They're going to, you know there's going
to be a person who's going to be calling us going. We have
someone for you so we're super excited to be actually changing
these systems here at Green River. Another one is shifting
finances to community services, also known as defunding the
police, which sounds so scary sounds so scary to me.
I think one thing we need to kind of be clear about a few things.
So defunding the police is not abolishing the police. There are
some people who want to do that, but it's. So what it is? Is it
shifting finances to community services. No matter how you feel
about it, I want to remind people that so many of what law
enforcement is doing today was historically not done by them
taking care of the mentally ill. Taking care of people with drug
addiction, dealing with things like immigration issues. These
historically had not been responsibilities of law
enforcement. And as as those other systems have eroded, you
know what happens when families are having a mental health
issue. They called the police because they have no, they don't
know who else to call, and oftentimes the police aren't.
You know, they don't have a lot of background and mental health,
and so you know we have to be thoughtful and considerate about
you. Know what these calls are like and who's best to serve
these populations. So you know that's part of that of the
defending the police. But shifting services to address
issues around mental health and drugs or or community outreach
and other things like that. Another important kind of idea
around reform would be increasing educational
opportunities. So all while mass incarceration was increasing.
Nyou know, those opportunities for inmates were really dwindling to
get, you know, training or
vocational. Training, but there's really good research
around those with us because those who participate in
educational opportunities actually have a 42% less likely
are 42% less likely to actually return to prison, so I think
it's really important. Education provides things like identity.
It provides self sufficiency. You're paying your bills, self
esteem, you're you're taking care of your family. You know
one of the best crime fighting methods is our jobs, right? And
so it's not surprising to me.
Another some of the other reforms were seeing is
reinstating voting rights. This is one that a lot of people just
don't know. So in 11 states still, felons lose their right
to vote indefinitely, or they require a governor's pardon and
we are, you know. Again, this is really abnormal if you look at
other countries where one of the only countries that takes away
voting rights I think, and again this is after people have served
their incredibly heavy sentences, so after that were
saying. You know, I think this is a chip at their identity.
You know it dehumanizes them it doesn't. It takes away their
citizenship and I think if you look at history again this looks
very similar to other policies that we've had that would
inhibit people or keep especially African Americans and
people of color from voting right? So again, you're seeing
these parallels are right in front of you. Just gotta look
right. Lastly, I did talk a little bit about phasing out
private. Prisons, but I think this would be a really really
Oh. I skipped one sorry, scaling back on collateral consequences.
So again, we've talked about with recidivism. How we almost
make it impossible to integrate back into the community. So we
need to start working at things like getting rid of that,
checking the box that you were convicted felon, allowing for
access to things like Section 8, allowing for drug treatment,
mental health treatment, all of
those things. Lastly, phasing out the prisons. I won't speak
about this too much since I kind of touched on it before, but
again, I just want to remind you these for profit prisons have
simply moved into kind of the detention centers immigration
detention centers. They've spent millions in lobbying
subcontracting GEO Group last year, made 2.4 billion in
revenue, and so again, really, really important to consider.
Kind of some of the economic forces that are.
Continuing these cycles. So with that, that's all I have for
right now. Just to remind you of what we did today, we looked at
institutional racism. We discuss those factors that led to mass
incarceration and its impact on Black Indigenous and people of
colour. We looked at outcomes associated with the war on
drugs, and we explain kind of how mass incarceration is. A
continuation of other systems of racialized oppression. I will
send out. I think we're recording this today so I can
send out the.
Recording, but I have also put together a book of suggested
reading. I'm so excited to be reading Just Mercy as a college.
It's such a good book. I mean, I couldn't put it down. I think I
read it in two days.
But here are some more books and some docs documentaries if
that's more your thing. Keep learning about this stuff.
Again, this is you have a vested interest. This is your world.
You are voters, but it's important to have this
information, so I think we're going to take around the last 15
minutes for questions and
answers. -So. We did. We have one question which came
you may have. I mean, I think you addressed some of
us in your talk.
But perhaps you wanna add something to it. It says
historically, Asian Americans were an are suppressed and
thinking about the Chinese Exclusion Act and executive
order 9066 Chinese virus, etc. However, they still managed to
have the lowest incarceration rate about .7%. And overall,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2018.
Why do you think that happened?
And Additionally, recent media recently media start have been
talking about Asian privilege. Do you agree with the term?
Thank you. -Yeah, great question and I apologize 'cause I only
got this question about 10 minutes before the presentation
so I didn't have alot of time to dig and research what I can say
is Asians have one of the
lowest. Incarceration rates and just involvement in the criminal
justice system. Overall, we talked about some of the
structural reasons why people of color aren't doing so well in
terms of poverty and employment and when we look at Asian
Americans, they are doing really well. They're making they're
doing really well. There's a heavy emphasis in education, so
you know, I think a lot of Asian kids find identity and
education. I think culture plays into it as well. They are more
of a collectivist culture so group minded, not those kind of
individual minded. So those are some of the best kind of ways I
think we can look at Asian Americans but also Asian
Americans have some of the least amount of Victimization as well,
right? So low crime rates but also low victimization. I'm
looking at this last one. It says. So I read some articles
about what what about so called Asian privilege, which
specifically targeting Asian
Americans, I think you know. I think yeah, in terms of certain
groups, agents have done really well, but I think Covid has done
a great job illustrating that they are still kind of, you
know, very much discriminating against with it being called the
China virus and everything else and so also if we look at
positions of power in America we don't see the same type of
representation from the Asian community. So yes, they're doing
very well economically. But I.
There are other, you know, sometimes they don't have places
to power. Hopefully that helps.
-So this question came in on
chat. Can you please expand a bit on the language surrounding
the idea of defining the police you address reallocation of
funding, but there's definitely a different meaning being
projected amongst politicians.
-Yeah, and so like I said, there's. There's definitely a
difference between abolishing or and there are people that are
calling for that, they're saying, hey, this is a system
that historically, you know it was law enforcement getting
runaway slaves that it's inherently racist. This is the
argument to, uh, you know, we can't just change the system.
The system needs to be dismantled with defunding the
police. I think you know the language makes it sound really
awful, right? Like there will be no funding or something like
that. But essentially, what what we're seeing is that some of the
funding will be reallocated to
community services. An it might means you know layoffs I. I
don't know specifically. You know, some of the outcomes since
we're just kind of starting to see this now. I think in a year
we'll have some better understanding of that.
-Here we have another question here. Could you explain a little
more on how you were talking about the system that was built
back in the day?
And. And how it how it still works now in terms of slavery
and oppressing others?
-Right, so it's just those connections in terms of the
exploitation of Labor, right? So we kind of talked about this in
the presentation where when we have for profit prisons,
corporations profiting from inmate labor, it starts to look
very similar to systems that we've seen in the past. You
know, after the Emancipation Proclamation in the late 1800s,
slaves were supposed to be free, right? But we started seeing
something called convict leasing and this is where slaves were
picked up for very trivial crimes like loitering. And I
want to remind you.
They were newly free. They didn't have places to go. They
were picked up for loitering and then they were leased out to the
very same. You know, slave owners at some point, and that
labor was exploited in that way. And so you start to look at
history. You can really come to connect these dots to kind of
modern day, seeing the prison labor in for profit prisons,
seeing it after slavery ended, and then really looking at
slavery is the beginning of
this. This time together.
-K I'm looking through chat now.
Um?
Sorry, chats moving.
-Sure. -So can I think there's a question about clarification
here. So prison labor happens in both for profit prisons and then
also state and federal prisons?
-Yes. -Um?
Alright. And then somebody just asked about where we're going to
share this video of this one place. I know it will be is in
the The One Book Research Guide, which you can find in the
library website. OK, we have a couple of another question here.
Let's see so this one says relating to incarceration versus
alternatives. Can you comment on the concept of drug court?
And then this person says in Yakima were convicted drug
offenders were diverted to drug court is where there
specifically. -Yeah and drug court. Yeah, there. It's a
specific court that's really looking at it.
With the idea of kind of rehabilitation involved right
that we want to see these people get better. I think one of good
just going back to kind of what I was talking about before. You
know, I didn't think I'd have time to talk about this, but
some of the major issues that law enforcement in our criminal
justice system is facing is mental health and drug
addiction. And I've done so much research around these ideas. As
I said, You know, the the systems that we've had before.
Mental health institutions have
eroded. And the new place for people that are mentally ill is
prison, right? And if you can imagine, prison just really
exacerbates mental illness and quite possibly produces it. And
people that don't already have it, oftentimes we hear about
violence in prison. But one thing I want you to think about
is that there isn't a lot of self harm in prison. Attempted
suicides. People hurting themselves, right? And these are
definitely indicative of major health problems. And so you
know, places are.
Drug courts will really try to facilitate taking on.
This problem from more of a rehabilitative approach. There
are other programs we have a couple of programs in Seattle
that's doing this. In Kent there's the Pals program. They
also, you know we're looking at kind of helping people with some
of these issues.
Personal issues out there having but at these really are societal
issues too. We see it.
Well, I hope I you know help answer that I don't know.
-Ok we have one more question here. This may be the last one.
There's been a lot of talk about who and why oppression impacts.
What about the ways in which all whites benefit? How does this
maintain white superiority and supremacy that works to benefit
all whites? -Yeah, well, we definitely benefit when we are
let off at every step of the criminal justice system, right?
And this is a form of privilege, right? Or having? I mean, I've
had people in my family who have gotten involved in in, you know,
crime, and but I also had an uncle who is a lawyer who helped
him fight his case. We had family that had resources that
could you know collectively come together to help pay for things
like rehab. And so I think you know, it's layers upon layers
upon layers of all this stuff that I've talked about, the
poverty in certain areas and.
And when we look at whites, we just have more resources so you
know they're layered one on one and one. We know that when
people get out of the system, the people who have the most
resources are the ones that fair the best. The people who
have families that are going to help them, a place to live
there being fed, they get a good job. Wow, you know, these
are the people who are really successful in the transition
back and it makes sense, right?
K.
I think we have no more questions listed. There's been a
lively chat happening at the
same time. So there's been more conversation and other ideas and
questions raised in there. I'll save the chat as well. Yeah,
thank you Jody and send that.
Send that to you.
Thank you. -Yeah and I just want to thank all of our participants
for attending today. I'm really grateful and appreciative that
you ca- came and I really miss you. I really miss being on
campus. It's so awkward talking to myself on a computer. You
know, I'm I keep going. I can't see their faces. I don't what
are they doing, you know. And so I hope you appreciated the This.
This discussion and conversation. Not much of a
discussion, but and you know, if you have any additional
questions. Email me, I'm so happy even you know if you're
not in my class don't even worry. Come to office hours if
you want to learn more. You know this was a 40 minute
presentation. We I do a whole course on it so we go way more
into the detail in those layers and stuff like that. Take a take
the criminology class but also there's a wealth of information
online I provided you all those resources, but you know, just
stay informed you you know you have the voting power too and so
it's really important that.
Your perceptions are, you know, right, right so.
Thank you, thank you all for
attending. We'll see you next time. Yeah, take Care Green River.