Overcrowding the Courts Isn't the Way to Reform Our Justice System

Will crowding an already-crowded criminal justice system lead to reform?

In yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review, Michelle Alexander has a provocative column called “Go toTrial: Crash the Justice System.” Alexander has a book out called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in theAge of Colorblindness, which argues that the outlandish rates at which we incarcerate African-Americans and Hispanics has created a new system of segregation, based on legal discrimination against people with criminal records. (Full disclosure: I have not actually read the book, although it’s on my list!)

In her column yesterday, Alexander makes a proposal. At the moment, less than 10% of criminal defendants ever make their case in front of a jury; the rest take plea deals that often destroy their future prospects for jobs, housing, social services, and other necessities. If more people accused of crimes actually demanded a jury trial rather than taking a plea deal, the courts would be unable to handle the increase. Then, Alexander says, there would be ”only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial ‘emergency’ fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash.”

While I share Alexander’s desire for serious criminal justice reform, recent history suggests a major problem with her idea. Nearly 50 years ago Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward made a similar proposal about the welfare system. In the 1960s, many people who were eligible to receive welfare benefits never applied for them, or applied and were wrongfully rejected. If more of those people actually demanded the benefits to which they were entitled, Piven and Cloward predicted, the insufficiently-funded welfare system would collapse under the weight of the demands and policymakers would be forced to establish a new, more equitable, more sustainable system of social provision.

Unfortunately, something different happened. In the 1960s and early 1970s, more people did demand the welfare support for which they were eligible. The number of welfare recipients increased dramatically (although there were also other reasons for the increase), as did the percentage of eligible people who actually received benefits.

But then there was a major backlash against welfare in the 1970s. Much of the New Right (whose legacy is the Tea Party) was mobilized by anger about increasing government spending on social services, especially welfare and other income supports. The federal government and the states began a decades-long effort to make welfare harder to get and more punitive to its recipients. This culminated in a major overhaul of the welfare system in 1996 that undercut the assistance programs that had supported millions of low-income Americans for six decades. Piven and Cloward’s proposal was doomed by many of the same social dynamics that, I think, would doom Alexander’s: racism, hostility towards the poor and minorities, and the belief that the people trapped in the system “deserve what they get.”

Alexander is absolutely right that increased numbers of jury trials would place more stress on our deeply flawed criminal justice system. But what’s to say that wouldn’t just result in longer delays before trial, ever-larger workloads for public defenders, and even worse outcomes for defendants? The criminal justice system is already overloaded; stressing its resources even more won't solve that problem. I’m all for dramatically reducing the number of people trapped in our so-called justice system, but I think history suggests that this isn’t the way to do it.

What Alan Lomax Can Tell Us About Research and Teaching in the Digital Age

Last week the New York Times reported that the world will soon have digital access to an unbelievable trove of recorded music and dance from around the globe, thanks to the decades-long effort by Alan Lomax and a crew of archivists who, since Lomax’s death in 2002, have worked to digitize the recordings and photographs he collected. According to the Times, this includes

some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts.

Lomax was an ethnographer who traveled throughout the U.S. and, eventually, the world to record people playing music and talking about their art. He later became interested in dance and performance. His recordings document musical traditions from around the world and are an unparalleled resource for musicians and historians. Now, the collection is in the process of being fully digitized and made available for free on the internet. 

As I work on my dissertation and contemplate my career prospects, I am constantly confronting questions about the roles of scholarship, academia, and education in an era in which an unimaginable amount of information is available to anyone with a computer. What’s the role of researchers, writers, and educators when everyone can find the answers to their questions with a Google search? Reading about this enormous digital collection helped me figure out a way to articulate an answer. 

Planned Parenthood: Health Care or Feminism? Can It Be Both?

For 36 hours my Facebook feed has been overflowing with people angry at the Susan G. Komen Foundation for canceling grants to Planned Parenthood that paid for breast cancer screenings. According to the Associated Press, the grants totaled about $680,000 last year – which is not actually very much in the context of PPFA’s and the Planned Parenthood affiliates’ budgets, which totaled over $1 billion in FY 2010. 

More significant than the amount of money is the spotlight this puts on Planned Parenthood’s careful positioning as a women’s health care organization – emphasis on the health care.

For nearly a century and a half, birth control has stood at the uncomfortable crossroads of medicine and services designed to empower women. Abortion was first outlawed in America in the 19th century as part of physicians’ (who were overwhelmingly male) efforts to make maternity care their responsibility rather than leaving it up to midwives (overwhelmingly female). But doctors didn’t quite know what to do about birth control, since it was preventive rather than curative -  and they specialized in curing diseases and solving problems - so their solution was basically to not provide birth control. When Margaret Sanger founded her first clinic in 1916, she argued that women needed birth control in order to control their own lives, but she soon lost command of her own organization to male doctors who had more respectability and clout but played down the women’s empowerment side of their work. In 1942, they changed the organization’s name from the Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood so they wouldn’t scare people who were put off by the idea of women “controlling” their reproduction.

1928 Catholicism = 2011 Mormonism? Or is it Islam?

Historian Robert Slayton has a column in the Times today about the anti-Catholic hysteria that Al Smith provoked when he ran for president in 1928 after four terms as NY governor. This is one of those pieces of history that, in my pessimistic moments, makes me think that we (as a society) haven't actually learned much from the past. It seems pretty clear to us now that it was, indeed, hysteria that caused people to think that, for instance, “if you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned,” or that Smith's election would mean that “you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible.” Shouldn't it be totally obvious to all Americans, then, that the election of a Muslim congressman would not result in sharia law (whatever the right wing means by that) usurping the U.S. Constitution?

You Know Who Doesn't Need More Cash?

Corporations and their shareholders. A study out yesterday from a group of U. Mass. economists says that major U.S. banks and corporations are in possession of $3.6 TRILLION in cash and other liquid assets, of which at least $1.4 TRILLION isn't necessary for their financial health and could instead be used to create 19 MILLION new jobs. They predict that if all of that money were actually spent on "productive investments and job creation" instead of remaining hoarded in the bank, the unemployment rate could fall below 5% by 2014.

So the next time you hear that raising taxes on rich people and corporations would hurt "job creators" by taking the cash they need to hire people, it's worth asking whether these corporations would even notice if a small bit of that $3.6 trillion left their pockets to help pay for needed government services. When you're swimming in the giant pool of money, you don't notice when the water drops an inch.

Also, check out this interesting take on why raising taxes would create jobs (hint: it's not because rich people would then willingly start paying more taxes).

Does Anybody in Washington Have Any Actual Ideas?

Instead of grading papers, I was procrastinating by browsing Twitter (obviously), which recommended that I check out @NRCC - the National Republican Congressional Committee. So I did, expecting to find something infuriating about the Republicans' positions - but I found something even worse: every single tweet is about Obama and the Dems. Do the Republicans have any actual ideas of their own?

Then I headed over to the NRCC's website, and here's what I found:

Keep in mind that these are the people in charge of shaping the Republicans' congressional campaign efforts and yet they seem unable to actually articulate something they stand for (although they're adept at finding things to oppose). Why is their lead banner about the Blue Dog Democrats, rather than about something the Republicans are actually doing?

But not to let the Democrats off too easy: for comparison, I checked out @DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Twitter feed. Here it is:

I guess from reading that we know that the DCCC is pro-union (really?) but otherwise it's much of the same: attack, attack, attack. And as for that labor thing - perhaps the DCCC just wants you to buy its merch? The DCCC website clearly shows, front and center, how to buy Dem merchandise (travel mug, anyone?*) and how to contribute money, but the most it has to say about what Dems actually support is this:

Supporting the DCCC is the single most effective step you can take to continue leading our country in a new direction. By fighting to retake the Democratic Majority in 2012 through protecting our Democratic members and electing new Democrats to Congress we can keep moving America forward.

And what does "moving America forward" mean, exactly?

Not to state the obvious, but perhaps we would end up with a more effective federal government if someone in either party came up with and advocated for actual ideas and policies, rather than just attacking the failures of the other side. 

And so begins another day of righteous indignation at our politicians and political system.

*Incidentally, the Dem merchandising program looks a lot like JetBlue's loyalty rewards program:

For some perspective: Jane Meyer on the successful efforts to stop the Keystone XL pipeline

Related to my previous post about movement-building: Jane Meyer has a nice Talk of the Town piece in last week's New Yorker about the successful efforts to stop the Keystone XL pipeline project, with a brief (but illuminating) comparison to OWS:

Yet the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest. The difference between the focussed, agenda-driven campaign fought by the environmentalists and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers, the historian Michael Kazin says, is that the environmentalists grasped the famous point made by Dr. King’s political forebear, Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

What makes a "movement"?

Tonight I saw Chris Hedges speak about Occupy Wall Street and his recent books. Although I agree with many of his views, his polemics made me a little crazy - but they did crystallize something I've been thinking about for a few weeks.

Is Occupy Wall Street a movement? Hedges certainly think so, and many others agree. The coiners of the OWS meme even called it "the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era." But as much as I agree with the basic principles of OWS, I have to say that I don't think it's a movement - not yet.

Historians have painstakingly demonstrated how much time, effort, and organizing it takes to build a sustained social or political movement. For many years now, historians have documented the "long civil rights movement," showing that activists, organizers, and lawyers spent decades laying the groundwork for the explosion of activism that finally made it into the nation's public consciousness between 1955 and 1965. Similarly, scholars like Dorothy Sue Cobble and Nancy Hewitt have shown how the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s grew out of decades of sustained, if quieter, organizing and activism. Analysts of the New Right have shown that organizing began in the early 1960s but did not result in political change for a decade or more - and it found eventual success because the movement's organizers and activists kept at it.

Moreover, these historians have shown how much organizing it takes to build a successful movement - the hard, unglamorous, slow stuff of talking to people about their concerns, developing strategies, undertaking  efforts that fail many times before they succeed, building organizations and coalitions, developing support, identifying goals, and on and on. This stuff takes years or decades, not weeks or months, to successfully achieve lasting change - and even then, that change is often incomplete.

I hope that OWS develops into a sustained movement that definitively changes our country's political conversation and, most importantly, public policies. But we're not there yet, so celebrating the success of the movement seems premature. We are certainly talking more now about economic inequality than we have in years - but for us to still be having those conversations years from now, OWS needs to take the long, slow, movement-building view.

Recommended reading:
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement
Nancy Hewitt, ed., No Permanent Waves
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," (Journal of American History)
John Dittmer, Local People
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors

I'm back!

It's been almost exactly a year since I started this blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently even though I haven't posted since April. I'm getting started again, with plans to experiment with different lengths and formats, and I'm going to aim for 2-3 posts per week. Follow me on Twitter @pastforwardpol to hear about new posts.

Back to life, back to reality... Gov't shutdown edition

Apologies for being MIA for more than a month. But I'm back, and here's what I have to say:

Republicans don't like Title X, and I don't like Republicans. Or Bill O'Reilly.

Several news outlets are reporting this morning that the government is on the verge of a shutdown because of Republican intransigence over Title X funding and other policy issues, none of which have anything real to do with the budget. Thankfully the Democrats, led by New York's own Senator Chuck Schumer, are standing strong against these efforts, at least so far.

But the conservative thinking on these issues is truly scary. In an interview last night with Charlie Rangel, Bill O'Reilly tried to differentiate between Title X funding and other health care funding, saying that: "Health care is another matter....That has to be taken very methodically because people's lives are affected....Nobody's life is affected by Planned Parenthood."

Perhaps he'd care to actually speak to one of the 3 million women and men who go to Planned Parenthood every year? If he doesn't want to have to be in a room with one of these radical people, he can just hear from them on the interwebs. But, as the Huffington Post points out, O'Reilly isn't the only one oblivious to the people who this actually affects: "The negotiations are dominated by men," Ryan Grim writes. "All of the principal negotiators in both parties are male, as are most of the senior staff involved."

NATO Kills 9 Afghan Children

Here's the worst story of the past 24 hours (beating out lots of competition for that title): NATO forces in Afghanistan "accidentally" killed 9 Afghan boys who were gathering firewood. Apparently the NATO troops who shot them from a helicopter mistook them for grown men who had earlier attacked a NATO operating base. I put "accidentally" in quotes not because I think it was purposeful, but because I just think it's appalling to excuse the murder of 9 children as an accident.

The story is doubly horrifying precisely because it's getting so little press in the U.S. It was buried on the fourth page of the New York Times and I didn't hear anything about it on NPR this morning. The hourly news headlines did, though, lead with a story about two U.S. soldiers killed in Germany, supposedly by an Islamic militant, although as usual the story didn't offer any evidence for that assumption.

It saddens me that we've gotten so complacent about our country's involvement in two unnecessary wars, and so certain that there's no way to end those wars and get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, that we've basically just started to ignore the atrocities that are going on there in our names. Killings of civilians were among the most important motivators for the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era, but today those killings happen so frequently and with so little news coverage that they barely raise a ripple. If we wonder why "Islamic extremists" are attacking U.S. soldiers in Germany, we might want to start by looking at U.S. soldiers killing children in Afghanistan.

What’s Really Behind the Attacks on Title X

John Boehner made a very telling comment in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Sunday. Discussing the proposed continuing resolution (CR) that will keep the federal government operating for two more weeks, he acknowledged that the Republicans will probably allow Title X’s funding for Planned Parenthood to continue for now, but not in the long term. Here’s his reasoning:

“The goal here again is to cut spending and keep the government open. I met with a lot of religious leaders earlier today to talk about the strategy and I think it’s important that we understand that what we want to do here is win the war not just win a battle. And there will be an opportunity some time in order to win the big war and we're looking for that opportunity. I don't think this short term CR is the opportunity that will get us there.”

So, for all the Republicans’ talk about the need to cut government spending, Boehner admitted here pretty clearly that the fight against Title X has nothing to do with that. Instead, it’s a capitulation to “religious leaders” and pro-lifers, and it actually detracts from accomplishing the goals of “cut[ting] spending and keep[ing] the government open.”

For those of us who support Planned Parenthood and all the other family planning providers out there, Boehner has given us fair warning. He’s planning a “big war,” so if we manage to sustain Title X funding during the current budget battle, we can’t let that make us complacent.

The good news is that Chuck Schumer has big plans to defend Title X: he told a rally on Saturday that the Republicans’ planned Title X cuts will be “dead on arrival” in the Senate. I, for one, am going to be writing him a letter to thank him and tell him to keep up the good work. Are you?

A CEO, A Public Employee, a Tea Partier, and a Democratic Governor...

This joke has been floating around the internet for the past couple of days: “A unionized public employee, a tea party supporter, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a dozen cookies on a plate. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier, and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants some of your cookie.’”

Brilliant, and it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so true. I woke up this morning to a radio report  about how the “surplus” income tax on people earning over $250,000 annually in New York is going to expire and talks to extend it are going nowhere, partially because Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo doesn’t support its extension. Instead, in order to balance the budget he apparently favors slashing health care for the poor, firing thousands of public school teachers in some of the state’s neediest neighborhoods, and cutting funding for the city’s already cash-strapped public transit system.

What is wrong with this picture?! Wealthy people in America pay the lowest taxes they’ve paid since before World War II, and to offset that lost revenue state governments around the country, as well as the federal government, are slashing programs for the poor and middle class. Investment bankers and large corporations did most of the work getting us into the economic mess in which we find ourselves – but they’ve largely recovered while everyone else is watching their wages get cut and government services get eviscerated.

Thanks to the influence of those same bankers and multinational corporations, the solutions elected officials are offering are to cut taxes, give those corporations more money, and cut education, health, and social service spending for the rest of us. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s Analytics just completed separate studies showing that these strategies are going to seriously hurt the economic recovery and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs – but it seems that no one in Albany or Washington is listening.

These days the world often really feels like a very, very dark version of Alice in Wonderland.

Americans Used to Agree on Public Funding for Family Planning. What Happened?

I have a guest post today on Slate's XX Factor blog about the history of Title X, the federal family planning program that House Republicans would like to eliminate. Check it out! I'll elaborate on it here in the next day or two, because it turns out to be hard to summarize my dissertation in 600 words.

100 Years Later, We Know Their Names

There's a haunting story in yesterday's Times about a researcher who has finally managed to compile a list of all 146 people killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire 100 years ago. The haunting part of it is that nobody had managed to do so earlier. I had no idea that until now there were at least 6 people who died in the fire but had never been identified. A researcher named Michael Hirsch has spent the last few years combing at least 30 newspapers from the early 20th century, correlating missing person reports and death notices with public records, charity reports, and descendants' stories to compile the most accurate and complete list to date of those who died in the fire.

This story is a harsh reminder of the anonymity of immigrants' and poor people's lives in early 20th century urban America. All of those who died had relatives and friends in New York at the time who knew they were missing after the fire, but their bodies were burned beyond recognition and their disappearances weren't tracked, even with the enormous amount of publicity that the fire received at the time. Plus, the relatives' grief may have prevented earlier positive identifications. The Times mentions one family who put a notice about a missing relative in the Forward, the Yiddish newspaper, saying that "We believe that he survived the fire, but from great fear and being upset he went mad and is wandering the streets."

It's tragic that it took so long to find these names, but better late than never, I suppose.

On Wisconsin

I've been inspired by what's going on in Wisconsin over the past week. It's exciting to see some serious labor and progressive activism, for once, and also to see that some Democrats have the spine to stand up to horrendous Republican proposals. It's clear that governor's proposal is just an attempt to decimate one of the last strongholds of organized labor in the country - the public sector - and I'm glad to see how many people all over the country have responded with horror. Did you hear about the pizza place in Madison that's delivered 1,000 pizza orders to the protestors at the state capitol, paid for by supporters all over the country?

Wisconsin has a long history of progressivism so it makes sense to me that this fight is happening there, but it's also why it's incredibly infuriating that the governor is such a rabid conservative. Wisconsin was the home of Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (in 1910),  as well as leading Progressive politician Robert La Follette and many of the other major voices of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. It was the birthplace of many labor laws and other reforms that we take for granted today, including the nation's first worker's compensation law. La Follette and the other Progressives fought the political power of railroads and other big corporations by breaking up monopolies and taxing corporate profits, helped create one of the nation's strongest public university systems, and regulated factory safety and work hours. Milwaukee had socialist mayors from 1910 until 1941.

I hope that the current effort to erode the collective bargaining power of Wisconsin's public employee unions doesn't set the kind of precedent that the 20th century progressive reforms did. What has upset me most about the whole situation was seeing pictures of the counter-demonstrators who came out yesterday to yell at the union activists. I hate that we have a political climate right now that pits "taxpayers" against "workers," failing to recognize that they are often the same people, and that those "workers" provide services that the "taxpayers" need, want, and appreciate. It is in all of our interests to make sure that public workers are well-compensated, not least because they help set a model of compensation that includes full benefits and retirement packages. I recognize that most American workers don't get those things anymore, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't all get them. The answer is not to demand the destruction of the few remaining jobs that provide a real safety net, but to demand that ALL of us get that kind of a safety net.

Reminder: Women Are Capable of Carefully Considering Their Decisions

New Hero Alert: Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who last night stood up on the floor of the House of Representatives and told abortion opponents that, having had a late-term abortion herself, "for you to stand on this floor and suggest that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought, is preposterous.” Thank you, Rep. Speier, for reminding all of us of something that should be obvious: that women have brains, consciences, and values, and they use all of those things to decide whether or not to carry their pregnancies to term.

Playing Chicken With Women's Health

Now that the Republican House is up and running, as part of the GOP's pledge to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” they’ve decided to target…wait for it… women’s health. Did you know that America’s unemployment crisis was caused by too many low-income women having access to high-quality gynecological care?

In all seriousness – some illustrious members of Congress have decided that a great way to cut the deficit would be to cut the funding for women’s health care that’s provided through a legislative provision called Title X of the Public Health Service Act. Title X provides grant money to health care providers to subsidize care for poor women. Nearly 5 million women get care from nearly 5,000 health care centers through this program. 

So what’s the problem? Well, for some conservatives, there are several. The general problem is that this care comes under the rubric of “family planning,” and conservatives don’t like to think that women are independent enough to have access to birth control and to be able to make wise decisions about how to use it. Never mind that along with birth control comes preventive gynecological care, screening for diseases like diabetes and hypertension, counseling about safer sex, and other primary care that poor women often don’t get anywhere else.

The specific problem is that about a third of these women get their care through Planned Parenthood clinics. Conservatives Do Not Like Planned Parenthood.

No Title X money has ever gone to pay for abortion care, and indeed Planned Parenthood and other recipients have to enact all kinds of artificial barriers within their practices in order to make sure that’s true – but they do so, in compliance with the law. Nevertheless, conservatives are just sure that Title X money is funding abortions. That’s their line, anyway, but I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t just abortion: it’s the whole idea of women having control over their own bodies and reproduction (and, therefore, their own lives) that freaks out lots of conservatives.

I’m writing my dissertation about Title X and other government programs that pay for family planning services for low-income women, and here’s why: in 1970, when Congress passed Title X, it did so *unanimously* in the Senate and by an overwhelming margin in the House of Representatives. At the time, supporters called access to birth control a “fundamental human right” for women. If there’s anything about the Nixon years that I’m nostalgic for, it’s this: the broad acceptance of the idea that women should be able to decide when they have kids. That  just doesn’t seem so radical, but apparently now, 40 years later, House Republicans think it is.

Coates "On Labor"

Go read this, now.

Jezebel on Women's "Fitness" Magazines

I've decided to start posting some of the best things I read on the interwebs here (and not just because it's easier than coming up with my own stuff to say all the time), so here's the first:

As a woman who loves running and other forms of exercise because they make me feel strong and help save me from my own head, I particularly appreciated this Jezebel takedown (er, analysis) of women's so-called "fitness" magazines. I wish there were good women's running magazines out there, or a good women's equivalent of Outside, which seems to specialize in putting half-naked men on the cover alongside headlines like "Road Tested: The World's Manliest Minivan." But alas, we're stuck with crappy magazines that tell us how to lose weight and look pretty while we exercise.

Here are a couple of choice excerpts from the Jezebel post:

We've long suspected that "fitness" is secret ladymagcode for "neurotic thinness," and a perusal of three of this month's "health" and "fitness" offerings- Self, Fitness, and Women's Health has shown that there's some serious subliminal self-worth eroding shit going on. Readers are sold the idea of being healthy and strong and fit and end up with a stack of weight loss ads and splashy graphics about having pretty hair. The pervasive "lose weight" message is fed to us like a dog pill slathered in peanut butter, and we're expected to just take it and go happily scampering off.

...

Women's fitness magazines are packaged and sold as an alternative to the sex obsessed man pleasing tips of the Cosmos of the world, but they're the same shit in a different package. They're still telling us that the way to be happy is to be conventionally attractive and thin and firm and toned, to occupy the socially acceptable amount of space. They're not about pleasing yourself; they're about pleasing others, and their suggestion that they're anything beyond that is insulting and condescending. Where's the magazine that promises to help you squat 150 pounds by June? Where's the guide to starting your own football league? Where's the secret to eating foods that will satisfy you after pounding out a 10 mile half marathon training run?