Posts by Bean

Bean is a third-year law student in New York City. Her blogging focuses on the intersections of criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender equality, and drug policy.

The Drug War: Still Racist After All These Years
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on May 9, 2008 at 7:54 PM.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The New York Times reported today on two new reports (one from the Sentencing Project and one from Human Rights Watch) that confirm what any study of prison demographics could tell you: the war on drugs is still being waged only on some people and on some drugs. In other words, it's still a racist crock.

Drug related arrests are up and more than 4 of 5 drug arrests are for possession (as opposed to sale or manufacture). And Black men are 12 times as likely to be incarcerated for a drug crime than are white men. Also, 1/3 of drug arrestees were black, despite the fact that only 12.8% of the population is Black.

The statistics would be bad enough. But the absolute worst part of the Times article is that the author cites a Manhattan Institute staffer as an "expert" on incarceration issues. What does she blame drug war disparities on? The "fact" that Black and Latino men are more likely to be involved in the distribution of heroin and cocaine.

Ms. MacDonald [of the Manhattan Institute] said it made sense for the police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in the inner city, largely involving minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.

“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” she said.

Riiiiiight. The policy makes Ooooooh so much sense. When racism and "personal responsibility" are your starting points.

Not surprisingly, the Human Rights Watch study's author gets it right:

“The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of the group’s report.

“If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” she said.

Americans Like To Throw Each Other In Prison
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on April 25, 2008 at 4:08 AM.

Given all the press recently about the U.S. incarceration rate -- which now tops 1 in every 100 adults -- it should come as no surprise that the US leads the world in both total number of incarcerees and the per capita incarceration rate. As Liptak puts it, our prison population dwarfs that of other countries. A dubious distinction if I ever heard one.

From Liptak's article in today's NYT:

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63. The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

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Mail Is A Fundamental Right
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on April 16, 2008 at 4:27 AM.

One more way that the criminal (in)justice system is whittling away at the small pleasures in life for the incarcerated in a Florida county: now their loved ones have to write extra teeny tiny. That's because now, based on a new directive, they will only be allowed to receive postcards. No S.W.A.K. allowed.

Here's more:

Pictures will have to be printed on postcards, and envelopes won’t be allowed, unless they contain legal correspondence.

Capt. Tom Eberhardt, assistant commander of corrections services, said the new policy is in response to the biohazard threat that locked down Charlotte County Jail last month when a mail clerk fell ill after opening a letter containing a white powdered substance.

“That’s happening more and more in the country because of the times we’re living in,” Eberhardt said. “We’re doing this for the safety and security of the staff and the inmates.”

As acallidryas says in her post (linked above), this is a serious overreaction. There's no indication that the white powder was a biohazard and the jail has already strengthened its mail-checking procedures. For many people, the letters from home and the pictures contained in them are the most frequent and strongest connection to home. Nevermind that many incarcerated men and women participate in correspondence courses (how's THAT going work?).

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Knocked Up? Your Job Might Be on the Line
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on March 28, 2008 at 6:08 AM.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that discrimination against pregnant women is on the rise. Up 14 percent in the past year, to be exact. And yet, pregnant women have very little recourse.

Jezebel (linked above) explains pregnant women's legal bind: "Employers can fire, lay off and refuse to hire knocked up ladies, but they have to provide ample proof that they held men to the same standards. They also have to provide maternity leave, as they would provide leave for any other medical issue, but in 48 of the 50 states, that leave doesn't have to be paid (readers in California and Washington State, you're the lucky ones)."

That's pretty much right. There is a Pregnancy Discrimination Act, but it's protections are limited. And it doesn't require affirmative protections for pregnant women but rather restrains companies from treating pregnant women worse than men and women who are not pregnant. In fact, the Supreme has specifically rejected any requirement of affirmative protections for pregnant women.

Of course, this all goes to the point that we live in a society that doesn't really care about having women as equal citizens, or really about children and even fetuses (except when they can be used as political pawns). Call me crazy, but I'd argue that firing a woman or treating her badly during her pregnancy is certainly not the way to assure a healthy pregnancy and birth.

Are Harvard Men Sidelined by Sharia?
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on March 13, 2008 at 2:02 PM.

Michael Graham at the Boston Herald has his panties in a bunch over Harvard's decision to create a women-only hour in the school's gym, so that Muslim women can exercise comfortably and in keeping with the rules of modesty imposed by Sharia. He calls discrimination against those poor Harvard boys who have been sidelined by the school's decision. Woe is them!

Now, here's the thing. I'll admit my ambivalence (to put it mildly) about religious edicts (of ANY faith) that require women's "modesty" while usually allowing men to traipse all over town. But, aside from the fact that we live in a pluralistic society that should accommodate many faiths, using this as an excuse to decry, oh, everything Harvard has ever done to encourage dialogue with Muslim students and world leaders is just bull.

I'm told by a Boston-native that the Herald is beantown's version of the NY Post. Graham certainly proved it today.

Italian Police Storm Hospital to Prevent a Late-Term Abortion
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on February 20, 2008 at 8:22 AM.

Is this what we're heading toward here in the U.S.? In Naples last week, police stormed into a hospital based on an anonymous tip that doctors there had performed an abortion later than 24 weeks (the latest date allowed under the country's 30-year-old abortion law). From the NY Times:

[P]olice officers entered the hospital and interrogated a Neapolitan woman, identified in the news media only by her first name, Silvana, immediately after the abortion and reportedly while she was still under the effects of anesthesia. They seized the aborted fetus.

Carmine Nappi, the chief of obstetrics at the hospital, likened the police intrusion to an anti-Mafia raid. “We’ve had countless complaints, we’re a hospital, but never a blitz like this,” he said by telephone on Thursday.

Nice one. Of course, tests proved that the fetus was 21 weeks gestational age, and that the woman had chosen to terminate the pregnancy based on tests that showed a serious fetal abnormality.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Why Are Blogs Evaluating What the Candidates' Wives Wear?
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on February 7, 2008 at 6:40 AM.

Over at Slate, the XX factor team is dissecting the wardrobe choices of the candidates' wives last night (what color tie was Bill Clinton wearing? Anyone? Bueller?). They've honed in on Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama's choice of a red suit. Here's what Dana Stevens had to say:

To wear [red] is to quote [Nancy Reagan] as unambiguously as McCain evoked the Reagan/Stallone '80s by marching onstage to the Rocky theme for his victory speech. Michelle Obama's donning of the hue is more complex. Obviously, this choice is supposed to recall the general optimism of the morning-in-America days. But is it also meant to reassure us that Michelle, who only last year left her high-powered job as an executive at the University of Chicago hospitals, will remain safely on the Nancy-esque sidelines when her husband becomes president, confining her role to charity work like the cleft-palate foundation whose board Cindy McCain serves on (and through which she adopted their now-16-year-old daughter from Bangladesh)? At any rate, the color-coded association of both women with the ultimate loyal-but-silent political spouse clearly serves to distance them from a certain prospective first husband who doesn't need to wear loud colors to get himself noticed.

Uh. Color me confused (bad pun intended), but I didn't think that Nancy Reagan had claimed ownership rights over the R in Roy G. Biv. I think Stevens is right that the red may be intended to bring to mind optimism. At least in the case of Mrs. Obama, I'm guessing it's also supposed to evoke energy and excitement, rather than the staid same-ol'. But, seriously, since when are we relying on the "neighborhood astrologer's" positive associations with red as the jumping off point for a discussion about presidential politics and PR? And why is it that we assume that Michelle Obama is invoking Nancy Reagan (whose politics she probably couldn't disagree with more), while Hillary Clinton is evoking...something else unnamed...when she wears red?

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Women Don't Leave Their Privacy Rights at the Jailhouse Door
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on January 30, 2008 at 9:48 AM.

It's not often that I get to write about good news with regard to the American criminal (in)justice system. But today is one of those rare days.

Late last week, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a Missouri District Court's holding that the state prison system is required to provide transportation for pregnant incarcerated women who want abortions. The decision overturns Governor Matt Blunt's policy of denying pregnant inmates access to abortion services by refusing to transport them to St. Louis for the procedure. (About 7% of incarcerated women are pregnant at the time of their sentencing; many more become pregnant during their incarceration by guards who sexually assault and rape them or by intimate partners who visit).

While the 8th Circuit rejected the district court's finding that the policy amounted to cruel & unusual punishment, the court affirmed the district court's holding that Gov. Blunt's policy violated the constitutional rights of women inmates by placing an undue burden on their right to abortion. As the lawyer who represented the pseudonymous plaintiff (together with the ACLU) explained, "abortion is not a right that is lost at the jailhouse door."

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Being Pro-Choice Is Not Enough
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on January 24, 2008 at 9:32 AM.

This post was originally published on 1/22/08

So, as you might have heard, today is the 35th Birthday/Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which was handed down on January 22, 1973. The organizers of blog for choice day have suggested we all write about why it's important to "vote pro-choice." While it's true that it's important to vote "pro-choice," I want to write about more than that -- why it's important to vote for someone who really understands what it means to want reproductive justice. In order to understand this, it's important to know how far Roe got us, and how far we've got to go.

Roe was a huge step. It said that the right to abortion was constitutionally-grounded and was too important -- to fundamental -- to be left to the whims of the state governments or to come and go at the will of the majority. Though the language of the decision had more to say about doctors than about women, the message of Blackmun's decision was loud and clear: women have a fundamental constitutional right to control their reproductive lives, not to let their reproductive lives control them.

Immediately after Roe, Medicaid funds became available for poor women to have abortions, and the right became a reality for many millions of American women. Since then, however, the times have not been so sweet for reproductive freedom. Facing pressure, violence, and over the top licensing requirements from the states, clinics have closed, leaving women in 87% of US counties without an abortion provider. The Hyde Amendment was passed and continues to bar poor women from receiving Medicaid funding for their abortions, with few exceptions. As Francis Kissling and Kate Michelman, two longtime leaders of the abortion rights movement (Kissling at Catholics for a Free Choice and Michalman at NARAL)

write in this week's Nation, the US has gone from being a leader in reproductive health access to a laggard.

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For Women Behind Bars Conditions Couldn't Be Worse
Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money on January 17, 2008 at 3:03 PM.

This shouldn't come as a surprise: prison is not a fun place to be for anyone, but especially not for women. Why is it so bad for women, you ask?

Well, for one thing, because of drug war policies that have a disproportionate impact on women, more women than ever are ending up in America's prisons and jails.

And once they're there, the conditions are even worse than the horrid conditions in men's prisons. In some states, there is so little room available in women's prisons, that women are being randomly assigned to men's prisons, where they are segregated, their freedom of movement is even more limited, and they face other discrimination with regard to the availability of education, job training, etc.

But wait! There's more!

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