“Our Current Investments In Justice System Are Unwise”: Criminal Justice Reform Ignores Victims Of Crime. That Makes No Sense
When policymakers think of the people who comprise the victims’ rights movement, young people of color from low-income communities may not be the first group that leaps to mind. But the facts suggest these survivors should be.
My organization conducted two years of research and found that one in five Californians experience crime – but its impact is concentrated and unequal. The majority of crime victims live in lower-income communities and repeat victimization is even more concentrated (echoing research on victimization in the entire US). When it comes to violent crime, those most likely to be repeatedly victimized are young people of color, especially African-American and Latino males.
Two out of three crime survivors reported being victimized more than once in the last five years. Many repeat victims have long histories of suffering multiple types of crimes, such as sexual exploitation, abuse or community violence. Worse still, only a small number of survivors receive any help, despite often experiencing severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress in the aftermath of crime.
Young people of color from low-income communities bear an unconscionably disproportionate burden of violence and crime – and are victimized at staggering rates while also the least likely to get help to recover from trauma. Most frequently victimized, least often supported. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.
Beyond lacking access to recovery support, most crime victims also disagree with the direction criminal justice policymaking has taken over the last few decades of prison expansion. While the traditional approach to victims’ rights has focused on toughening punishments for people convicted of crime and strengthening the rights of victims during criminal proceedings, our research shows that most survivors of crime think that our current investments in justice system are unwise. Two out of three California victims surveyed believe bloated prisons either make inmates better at committing crimes or have no impact on crime at all. Most survivors want greater investments into rehabilitation, mental health treatment and prevention over bigger prisons and jails.
Listening to crime victims can tell us a lot how we should reform our safety and justice systems. We must embrace survivors as unexpected advocates for justice reform. It’s time to stop pretending that building more prisons protects survivors – it doesn’t.
Procedural rights for victims are critical, and accountability for people who commit crime is an essential component of an effective criminal justice system. Yet, many victims never even get to a courtroom. National statistics reveal that over half of violent crime goes unreported, eliminating any possibility of a prosecution. And even when violent crimes are reported, less than half result in an arrest. So focusing only on criminal proceedings leaves out the experiences and needs of the majority of crime survivors.
Packed prisons and extreme sentencing for the fraction of crimes that result in a conviction also depletes the very resources needed to improve victim protection and community safety. We need to rethink what investments can serve and protect as many victims as possible, including the communities most impacted by crime. We should pay special attention to the needs of those at greatest risk of being repeatedly victimized, such as youth of color.
When victims go without trauma recovery support, they risk being victimized again and falling through the cracks in life: dropping out of school, suffering health problems, self-medicating to the point of addiction and even turning to crime themselves.
David Guizar knows this well: growing up in South Central Los Angeles, his older brother – and father figure – was shot and killed when David was 10. He never learned what happened, nor did his family learn about or access any services that exist for survivors of violent crime.
David felt lost after his was family broken, and he filled the void with alcohol and drugs for decades, finally getting sober in 2006. Then, in 2012, another one of David’s brothers was killed when a stranger tried to enter a family wedding.
“After our family’s losses, we never heard about existing supports for survivors of crime, which would have made a big difference in our ability to recover,” said Guizar. “California clearly has the money – the state spends $10 billion per year on a prison system to respond to crime – but I and other survivors want lawmakers to know that we can invest these resources in smarter ways to help survivors both recover from and prevent crime.”
Instead of continuing to create harsh penalties that, in turn, create more prisons as our response to crime, we should invest in mental health care and trauma-informed services for anyone traumatized by violence, as well as safe places to go when crisis erupts, family support programs and economic recovery assistance for victims. We also need to improve the relationship between police, prosecutors and the communities they serve, so that victims trust – and can safely cooperate with – law enforcement to solve more crimes.
Despite the prevalence of pro-victim rhetoric during the prison-building era, few policymakers have asked themselves who experiences crime, who is most vulnerable to repeat crime or what survivors need to recover and avoid future harm. Most crime victims have never been at the center of attention of criminal justice policies, nor have their experiences and needs been considered as penal codes and prison populations mushroomed over the past three decades.
But the evidence suggests that when you ask the people most affected, survivors are less interested in spending tax dollars to fill more prisons and instead want to prioritize investments that will actually prevent crime in the first place. It is time for policymakers to finally listen – and put the perspectives of those most vulnerable to harm at the center of policies.
By: Lenore Anderson, The Guardian, May 21, 2015
“Koch Brothers’ Humiliating Secret”: Why Even Their Billions Can’t Save The GOP From Self-Destruction
Faced with the nightmare of up to 20-something GOP presidential candidates in 2016, Fox News last week announced its bid for sanity: It would limit its debate to the top 10 candidates in national polls. Now David Koch tells Larry Kudlow that he and brother Charles are likely to distribute some of the $900 million they’ve socked away for 2016 to “several” contenders, not just one Republican candidate.
Paul Waldman reads this as an attempt to cull the GOP field, and so do I. The Kochs can spread the wealth, at least among Republicans, because the entire 2016 roster supports their tax-slashing, regulation-gutting, climate-change accelerating policies. Their real interest is having a limited debate among the “grown-ups” of the party and sending a strong candidate off to face the Democratic nominee, most likely Hillary Clinton.
Charles Koch said something similar last month to USA Today, specifically mentioning Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. ”Those are the ones we have talked to the most and who seem to be the possible leaders,” Koch said.
At the time, Charles’s comments were widely interpreted as cleaning up an earlier mess made by brother David, when he told New York GOP donors that the Kochs would only get involved “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination.” That was taken as a sign they backed the man who turned Wisconsin into an arm of Koch Industries.
When Charles Koch came out days later and said the brothers would in fact back “several” GOP candidates, I took it as evidence that they recognized that Walker had stumbled early and often in his first forays into national politics, and he shouldn’t be their only bet.
Now I think it’s a sign of many things, none of them good for the GOP.
First, even though the Democrats’ 2014 effort to raise awareness of the Kochs’ control of the GOP was widely perceived as a failure, it succeeded in making the Kochs edgy about their public image. They don’t want anybody IDed as the Kochs’ man.
It’s also a signal they don’t see anyone who’s a slam-dunk winner: Walker and Jeb Bush have matched each other for missteps all year, and the Kochs can’t afford to back a loser.
But it’s also a sign that for all their influence with the GOP field, the Kochs can’t force a change in the top candidates’ political platform. Despite their claims that they’re still libertarian on abortion rights and marriage equality, and despite evidence they support comprehensive immigration reform, the brothers don’t even pretend to be searching for a candidate who’s moderate on any of those things.
Even the great and powerful Kochs can’t force GOP moderation on those issues — and they don’t really care that much, because their political commitments are all about their bottom line, anyway.
While the Kochs look for a way to prop up “the possible leaders” of the GOP field, Fox will try to stage-manage the clown show. Fox’s decision to use national polls, rather than polling in key primary-state races, has the benefit of wider inclusion. Biographic and demographic curiosities like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, two “non-politicians” who don’t have a prayer of running serious, nationwide campaigns, will likely make the cut.
Thus the Fox debate stage will likely feature two Latinos (Cruz and Rubio), plus an African American and a woman, vying to lead a party in which white men make up the majority of voters.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Friday that the Kochs’ efforts were eclipsing Karl Rove and his American Crossroads empire, which failed spectacularly in the 2012 cycle. Rove is suffering for his ties to the last, spectacularly unsuccessful GOP president, George W. Bush – but he doesn’t particularly get along with Bush’s brother. Not to worry: Crossroads seems to be carving out a role in attacking Hillary Clinton.
But Rove, too, was supposed to be seeking the great GOP moderate after Tea Party extremists hijacked his party and made it unelectable in presidential races. Neither Rove nor the Kochs seem able to steer the field away from demographically destructive policies on gay rights or immigration. Money can’t buy moderation on social issues, at least not yet, so the GOP’s best hopes involve trashing the Democratic nominee in 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 26, 2015
“I’m Not An ‘Official’ Candidate”: Will Jeb Bush Get Away With His ‘Scheme’ To Skirt Campaign Finance Rules?
With candidates and outside groups already raking in money for the 2016 presidential contest and the Federal Election Commission abdicating its duty to enforce campaign finance laws, watchdog groups are pushing the Department of Justice to fill the void. To start, groups are asking the DOJ to investigate one of the most blatant exploiters of lax enforcement: Jeb Bush.
For months now the former Florida governor has kept up the elaborate charade that he is not quite sure if he will run for the Republican presidential nomination. “No, no. I’m not an official candidate,” he said during an exchange with reporters a few weeks ago—never mind that he’s been crisscrossing the country raising amounts cash unprecedented for an undeclared candidate. Bush himself has struggled to maintain the farce, as he demonstrated minutes later when he accidentally declared, “I’m running for president in 2016.”
The implications of Bush’s protracted non-candidacy are serious. By waiting to announce his bid for the White House, Bush has skirted one of the last remaining campaign finance rules: the ban on coordination between candidates and super PACs. (To be sure, that supposed firewall already looks more like a shower curtain.) Once Bush officially declares his intention to run, his campaign will be bound by that rule and by limits on donations directly to candidates ($2,700 in the primaries). But until then, absent action by regulators, Bush is apparently free to raise money and direct strategy for Right to Rise, the super PAC that is expected to eventually take on many operations normally undertaken by a campaign committee—not just television and online advertising but also direct mail, data collection, and phone banking. And unlike a campaign committee, the Super PAC’s ability to raise money for these activities won’t be hampered by contribution limits.
In a letter sent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Wednesday, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 allege that Bush and Right to Rise are “engaged in a scheme to allow unlimited contributions to be spent directly on behalf of the Bush campaign and thereby violate the candidate contribution limits enacted to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption.” The groups asked the DOJ to appoint a special counsel from outside the department to investigate the allegation, noting that it would look suspicious were a Democrat-appointed Attorney General to go after a Republican candidate.
The letter argues that Bush should be considered a candidate despite his disavowals, because he’s been acting like one “in all pertinent respects.” He’s hired strategists and buttered up local Republican leaders in early primary states like New Hampshire and Iowa. He’s headlined dozens of events for Right to Rise, many of them fundraisers with a $100,000 ticket price. His advisers are overseeing the super PACs operations. Reportedly Bush has even set the timing of his official campaign announcement—expected mid-June—to leave room for a “cross-country fundraising tour” for Right to Rise before the non-coordination rule kicks in.
Democracy 21 president Fred Wertheimer said that Bush’s association with Right to Rise is “the most blatant example to date” of how super PACs dedicated to a single candidate are being used to circumvent contribution limits. But Wertheimer’s group and the Campaign Legal Center are preparing to ask the DOJ to probe other potential violations by presidential candidates and individual-candidate super PACs.
While the FEC has jurisdiction over civil enforcement of campaign finance laws, the Justice Department can pursue criminal, or “knowing and willful,” violations. The DOJ’s first prosecution involving coordination between a super PAC and a campaign committee was announced in February, in a case involving a campaign manager for a Virginia congressional candidate who coordinated with a super PAC to leverage $325,000 in advertising against a rival. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said at the time that the department “is fully committed to addressing the threat posed to the integrity of federal primary and general elections by coordinated campaign contributions, and will aggressively pursue coordination offenses at every appropriate opportunity.”
“The Justice Department is the only place where we have a chance of getting the laws enforced,” Wertheimer said. “The FEC is useless.” The chairwoman of the commission, which is hamstrung by a three to three split among the commissioners, acknowledged as much recently when she told the New York Times that “the likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim… People think the FEC is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.” If neither enforcer steps up, then according to Wertheimer “We’re going to see the most massive campaign finance violations in the history of the country, done by various presidential candidates.” (A DOJ spokesperson told The Nation that the department would review the letter, but declined to comment further.)
Daniel Weiner, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FEC staffer, shares Wertheimer’s critique of the commission. “It beggars belief that there hasn’t been a single case worth bringing in the last six years,” he said, noting that the FEC hasn’t pursued any cases related to the coordination rule since the Supreme Court unfettered super PAC spending in Citizens United.
But Weiner doesn’t believe that the DOJ can “substitute for competent and active civil enforcement,” because not all violations that warrant a response from regulators rise to a criminal level. “Sooner or later we need to do something about the FEC. It’s nice to talk about the Justice Department, and I support efforts to get disclosure through other avenues, but as long as we have a completely dysfunctional civil regulator there’s going to be an elephant in the room,” he said.
And if that doesn’t happen before the 2016 contests truly heat up? “We’re going to have the Wild West,” Weiner concluded.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, May 27, 2015
“The Right’s Collective Amnesia And Fantasia”: Former Republican Senator Admits The Obamacare Court Challenge Is Built On Lies
For months, when the Affordable Care Act was still swimming upstream through the legislative process, President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats courted Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine, thinking she would respond rationally to enticements and provide Democrats bipartisan cover to reform the U.S. health insurance system.
Their efforts ultimately failed. Snowe, like every other Senate Republican, voted against the health reform bill in 2009 and 2010, and then joined Republicans in their various efforts to undermine or repeal the law, until she retired in 2013.
But now it looks like all the time Democrats wasted on negotiating with Snowe, and allowing her to help shape the legislation, has paid off. Snowe has, to my knowledge, become the first contemporaneous Republican senator, current or former, to acknowledge that a Supreme Court challenge meant to cripple Obamacare is built on a tissue of lies. If the Court sides with Obamacare opponents, her comments will become incredibly relevant to the ensuing political shitstorm.
“I don’t ever recall any distinction between federal and state exchanges in terms of the availability of subsidies,” Snowe admitted, according to New York Times health reporter Robert Pear.
“It was never part of our conversations at any point,” said Ms. Snowe, who voted against the final version of the Senate bill. “Why would we have wanted to deny people subsidies? It was not their fault if their state did not set up an exchange.” The four words, she said, were perhaps “inadvertent language,” adding, “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
There are two intersecting argumentative threads that one must untangle to really understand King v. Burwell. The first, specialized one addresses the question of what the text of the Obamacare statute means. Does it, in all its interlocking, cross-referenced parts, provide authorization for the IRS to issue subsidies to all exchanges? Or does it prohibit those subsidies in the three dozen states that have availed themselves of federal fallback exchanges, through Healthcare.gov? Only the most cribbed reading of the law—literally less than a sentence of the whole text—suggests the latter.
The second thread is, if anything, even more straightforward: What were the framers of the Affordable Care Act trying to do? Were they trying to stitch together a harmonious system across all state borders, with subsidies available everywhere? Or were they trying to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by threatening to withhold subsidies from their citizens, and impose chaos on their insurance marketplaces? There is no evidence to suggest that the goal of the Affordable Care Act was the latter.
These threads invariably become entwined for two reasons. First, if Congress was trying to create an incentive for states to set up their own exchanges, then its failure to provide those states clear notice of the threat in the law raises serious constitutional concerns. But also, judges have consciences and intellectual standards, too, and may in some cases allow their understanding of the political history of the Affordable Care Act to influence the way they think about what the text of the law actually conveys. This explains why conservatives have been engaged in a year-long campaign to revise the history, and assert that the framers of the ACA knew all along that threatening the states would leave the law vulnerable to ruin, but did it anyway.
Pear’s article largely elides the textual question—if anything, it proceeds from the assumption that Obamacare opponents have a better legal case than they really do. But at the same time, it is devastating to the spin that Republicans are putting on the ACA’s history to bolster the plaintiffs in King.
Here, for instance, is Snowe’s erstwhile colleague, Senator Orrin Hatch, who served with Snowe on the committee that drafted Obamacare, claiming that the law’s drafters, not its enemies, are falsifying the historical record to influence judges.
“The Democrats were arguing that the only way to get the states to sign up is to put the pressure on them by making them have to do a state exchange, so it’s kind of disingenuous for them to come in now and say they didn’t mean that,” Hatch told reporter Todd Zwillich in this DecodeDC feature. “I’m not the only one that knows that. Their attitude was, you’ll never get all the states to sign up if you don’t force them. Yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt in the Democrats’ minds they wanted to do that because they were afraid the states wouldn’t form their own exchanges. Now they’re trying to say they didn’t say that, but they did.”
With respect to King, almost every Republican member of Congress is, like Hatch, caught in the grip of the right’s collective amnesia and fantasia. The spectacle of it is breathtaking to sentient observers of the health reform process, but ultimately meaningless if the Supreme Court does the right thing in June, and rules for the government. If it doesn’t, the textual argument will effectively be over. But, for the purposes of reading such a bad decision into its proper context, addressing the ensuing chaos, and clarifying for the record for the public, the historical argument will take on even greater significance—which makes Snowe’s contribution extremely valuable.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, may 27, 2015
“The Sounds Of Silence”: What Clinton’s Do Is ‘Scandalous,’ What Republicans Do Is… Ignored
Whenever a transgression against transparency is charged to the Clintons, whether real, alleged or invented, America’s political media rise up in sustained outrage. From the offices of the New York Times Washington bureau to the Manhattan studio of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, journalists bitterly protest Hillary Clinton’s erased emails and her family foundation’s fundraising methods. And they will surely snap and snark about her “scandals” from now until Election Day.
Which under present circumstances might be justified, since she happens to be running for president — except for one glaring problem. Very few in the press corps apply the same standards to any Republican politician.
Nobody will ever get to see the thousands of messages erased from the private email account used by former Secretary of State Colin Powell when he held that high office. He got rid of them and got away with it (as most likely did former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who implausibly claimed not to have used email, when the State Department asked for hers).
Or at least such is the attitude of the press and punditry, who seem to believe that the dumping of Powell’s emails is somehow “different” from what Clinton did. And it is, of course – because she turned over more than 30,000 emails, while he turned over zero. But there is no sound of furious buzzing within the Beltway over the Powell emails; instead there is absolute silence.
Do readers and viewers want to know what Powell and Rice’s emails said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a topic of political and historic interest? Don’t they have a right to know? Well, Washington journalists who claim to represent the public interest don’t care.
And the double standard protecting Republicans extends well beyond the email “scandal.”
Consider the Clinton Foundation, whose critics complain that its fundraising has been opaque and suspect. The names of all of its donors have been posted on its website for years (except for a tiny 0.3 percent who gave to a related Canadian foundation and went unreported for arcane legal reasons).
To this day, however, George W. Bush’s foundation, which collected $500 million to build and endow his presidential library in Texas, has refused to disclose the name of every donor. The names that have been disclosed are difficult to find, unless you visit the library itself.
Like Bill Clinton, Bush began to raise money for his library from undisclosed donors while still in office, which raised ethical concerns. Bush told reporters that he might well raise money from foreign donors (which he did) and might not disclose any of their names (he disclosed some, years later). He hosted White House dinners and meetings around the country for potential library contributors, also unnamed.
Only after the London Sunday Times caught a lobbyist pal of Bush on videotape in July 2008 — soliciting $200,000 for the library from someone who claimed to represent a Central Asian dictator — did the Bush White House promise not to raise money from abroad while he was still president.
Yet this little scandal provoked no more than a few days of press coverage, a flurry of denials, and one or two tut-tutting editorials. And now that brother Jeb is running for president, nobody thinks to demand all the names of all the Bush library donors, so the press and public can gauge their potential influence on the candidate.
No, that kind of obsessive inspection is reserved for one political family. Their name is not Bush.
Those Clinton Foundation critics have gone so far as to claim that it isn’t a charity at all, despite top ratings by Guidestar and Charity Watch. A Wall Street Journal editorial snarled that any good done by the foundation is merely “incidental to its bigger role as a fund-raising network and a jobs program for Clinton political operatives.” Actually, the foundation has employed thousands of people, few of whom had any political ties, to bring vital services to the poor around the world.
But there is at least one tax-exempt entity that serves no charitable purpose, existing only to employ political aides and family members: the “Campaign for Liberty,” dubiously subsidized by campaign funds left over from Ron Paul’s political accounts.
Its employees, which include most adult members of the Paul family and most of Ron and Rand Paul’s top operatives, move between “charity” and campaign. It reimbursed Ron Paul’s expenses, even after taxpayers had already paid those same travel bills. Its current leadership is entangled in a festering scandal in Iowa, where prosecutors are investigating the alleged bribery of a local GOP official who shifted from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul in 2012.
Which other presidential candidates are involved in such non-profit nastiness? How many used private email accounts and conveniently lost the archives? Voters will probably never find out – because nobody named Clinton is involved.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, May 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 