The Organization on Procedural Justice (OPJ) Racial, Ethnic and Religious Profiling.

Commissioned by the The Rt. Rev. Thomas E. Breidenthal

Diocese of Southern Ohio

A BRAIN TRUST OF SCHOLARS

A WHITE PAPER For review by

The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry Presiding Bishop-Elect

The Episcopal Church.

Researchers: Merelyn B. Bates-Mims, PhD Arthur L. Burnett, Judge Retired Clarence Edwards, MS James A. Dula, PhD Philip Lee, JD

“Changing History: Transforming Systems of Justice” MAJOR SOURCE REFERENCES The Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes. Clarence Edwards, Vice-Chair, OPJ “A Historical Perspective on American Policing.” Heather Ann Thompson How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America. Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Unequal Justice: Mobilizing the Private Bar to fight Mass Incarceration Christopher Wildeman, Definitions Brian Stevenson. Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Sentencing 13 and 14-year old Children to Die in Prison. 2007 Equal Justice Initiative. The Urban Institute. The Prison Population Forecaster Lauren Victoria Burke, The Root. Turning Action Into Law to Stop Police Killings. Charleston Wang, JD, Member, Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Statistics: Drug War Facts: Racial Profile and Demographic. Peter Wagner. Prison population affecting lori a s re istric ng g t .

Amending

Legal Flaws:

The Thirteenth

Amendment

and

Mass

Incarceration

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INFLUENCES ON PRISON GROWTH Primary Influences Private Prisons (‘For Profit’) Law Enforcement Prison Construction Companies Prison Guard Unions

Secondary Influences Politicians Courts Prosecuting Attorneys; DAs Prison Industries Rural Economic Development The War on Drugs Investment Banks

Ideological Influences Political Action Committees Victims’ Rights Groups Think Tanks The Media

Environmental Influences Urban Developers Big Agri-Business Corporate Welfare Big Industries & Corporations

Results of Inequality Surveillance Housing Crisis Homelessness Police Brutality Racial Profiling Fear & Hatred of Immigrants Discontentment & Resistance Addiction No Health Care Medicare Costs Too Much No Mental Health Treatment Exclusion from politics; Disenfranchised Limited Access to Resources Pollution & Environmental Hazards Violence Malnutrition Poor Education and Drop Outs Unemployment, Exploitation & Overwork Debt, Debt, and More Debt Day-to-Day Insecurity Violence against People of Color, Women, and Indigenous People

“Oppression exists because the dominant rulers of society find it highly profitable.”

-Herbert Aptheker.

OVERVIEW

Within clarified human eyesight when is a little child not a

man, profiling law notwithstanding? –mbm

WHAT IS THE CONTEXT FOR TODAY’S PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?

www.bing.com/images/search?q=Prison+Industrial+Complex+Infographic&view

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MISSION GOAL The ‘duly convicted’ requirement of the Thirteenth Amendment ‘except as punishment for crime’ of the U.S. Constitution is the fundamental authorization for the legal incarceration of the massive 2.2 million men, women, and children behind bars today. The authorization continues slavery-for-profit beyond 1865 and enables the modern creation of a Prison Industrial Complex. The mission goal of The Organization on Procedural Justice is to amend the legal flaws of the Thirteenth Amendment language authorizing prisoners as ‘slaves of the state’. – -Merelyn B. Bates-Mims

DEFINITION A White Paper is an authoritative and educational report giving information or proposals on an issue. It serves as a guide informing readers in a concise manner about a complex issue and presenting the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It serves to create an awareness of policy issues and to encourage exchange of information and analysis. It is meant to help readers understand the issue, solve a problem, and make a decision.

DEFINITION Whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, the carceral state, or hyper-incarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. -Christopher Wildeman

Fair Use Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 Copyrighted materials in this report are used

in accordance with Fair Use Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, used here to advance

understanding of social justice issues.

TABLE OF CONTENT Part I – Executive Summary Part II – The Problem What is the issue that demands resolution? Why does it exist? Is it getting worse? Who is affected? What will happen if solutions are not found? Part III – The History How did we get here?

What milestones, events, and developments have brought us to this place?

Part IV – Legal Solutions: Dismantling unjust laws and systems.

Legal Precedents? What challenges lie ahead?

Part V – The Benefits of Change: Alternatives to mass incarceration

What if…?

Education, Fair Wages, Families and Children

VI – Call to Action Recommendations

Systemic Change vs. Activism

Who’s, What’s and How’s.

VII – Partnerships and Foundation Grants

Sources and Resources

VIII – References

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THEOLOGY What is the theology of for-profit mass incarceration? Who ought to be entitled to the benefits of unpaid labor?

This latter is a question having a very long history among human kind. The question yet remains and is the core proposition of this paper prepared by OPJ for review by the Office of the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church.

THE MORAL LAW Deuteronomy 24:15 Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the LORD against you, and you will be guilty of sin.

DEFINITION As defined by some Early Church writers, the word ‘slavery’ connotes the condition of involuntary servitude by humans as the property of another, a thing rather than a person. This form of slavery can be called “chattel slavery,” whereby the slave is not a legal person and, under Roman Law, has no legal citizenship rights. A slave is one who can be legally and forcibly compelled to unpaid labor to the benefit of a private owner, but which, in this age of the New Jim Crow, as a slave of the State. Historically, the chattel slave tended to be involved in large- scale industrial and agricultural work—now the 21

st century

prison industrial complex (CPI). The prison industrial complex is maintained by meeting the

increasingly larger levels of supply and demands of

corporate profiteering.

Part I – Executive Summary

Among the 27 July 2015 New York Times features is an article on The Outlaw Ocean, written by Ian Urbina and having the title ‘Sea Slaves’: orce Labor for C eap Fish’ which tells the story of organized servitude in the South China Sea on fishing boats whose nets are cast for fish that will become “pet food and livestock feed.” The next time you are in a chain grocery store, stop a minute at the refrigerated pet food section and view the suavely packaged pet foods on display, packaging nearly indistinguishable from any other rolled packages of food, but designed for pet and live stock rather than human consumption. The product advertisements are charming and sophisticated; and like the goods produced by U.S. prison slavery and New Jim Crow mass incarceration, the horrors, deaths and misery in China underlying such profit-bearing commerce are hidden from general public everyday awareness. -Merelyn Bates-Mims, PhD. General Co-Chair, The Organization on Procedural Justice OPJ Brain Trust of Scholars

Part II – The Problem What is the issue that demands resolution? Why does it exist? Is it getting worse? Who is affected? What will happen if solutions are not found? The Brain Trust of the Organization on Procedural Justice (OPJ) has prepared this white paper, entitled Amending Legal Flaws: The Thirteenth Amendment and Mass Incarceration, outlining the content and history of 13th Amendment "duly convicted..." slave incarceration language, its continuing devastation and long-term adverse effects on certain citizen groups in the United States, particularly people of color. This paper provides practical and productive (moral) alternatives that Amendment language replacement creates; it enables leadership review, discussion and informed decision making and actions. It clarifies the road ahead and lays out the roadmap to mission goal achievement. OPJ scholars have prepared this white paper on mass incarceration for review by the Office of the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church. The Brain Trust of Scholars of The Organization on Procedural Justice (OPJ), its formation having emerged from the recommendations of the Bishop of the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s 2014 Task Force on Racial Profiling research study, constitutes the organized 'capacity' for making a multi-disciplinary case against the continuance of prison slavery, aka 'mass incarceration, authorized by the deliberative loophole language of the Thirteenth Amendment.

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AMENDING LEGAL FLAWS

The Thirteenth Amendment to the

Constitution

Section 1. Neither slavery nor

involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for

crime whereof the party shall have been duly

convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any

place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Section 2.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article

by appropriate legislation.” Ratified December 6, 1865.

I view slavery as involuntary immigration where people from Africa were forced against their will to leave their homes and were transported in chains to these shores. Those enslaved are nonetheless immigrants just like the people who crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to find political and religious freedom and economic opportunity for themselves and their children (economics and race are hand in hand in making immigration policy).

-Charleston Wang, JD, Member, Christ Church Cathedral,

Cincinnati. Immigration and Civil Rights in

America

Who are the ‘duly convicted’? “Seventy-three (73) children in the United States have been sentenced to life imprisonment without any chance for parole despite being only 13 or 14 at the time of the crime, according to a newly published study by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is a nonprofit legal research and advocacy group based in Montgomery, Ala. and New York City. These 73 children were tried as adults and condemned to die in adult prisons. EJI study found that the majority were accomplices to adults or older teens who were more culpable for the crime. In seven (about 10 percent) of these cases, the offense did not result in anyone’s death; in one case, no one was even injured. Nearly two-thirds of these 73 children are kids of color and many were victims of severe abuse and neglect.” – Brian Stevenson. Cruel and

Unusual Punishment: Sentencing 13 and 14-year old Children to Die in Prison. 2007 EJI Who is less likely to be represented by legal counsel? “As a first-time offender, you are looking at a maximum sentence of five years prison. However, a criminal defense lawyer may be able to get your charge reduced, keep you out of prison or perhaps get your charge dropped completely...” -Website: A Florida Criminal Defense Attorney In 1995, the U.S. Sentencing Commission concluded that sentencing disparities [mandatory sentences] created a "racial imbalance in federal prisons and led to more severe sentences for low-level crack dealers than for wholesale suppliers of powder cocaine…Thousands of people, mostly African Americans received disproportionately harsh prison sentences." President Obama signed The Fair Sentencing Act (Public Law 111-220) in 2010.

Involuntary Servitude.

TOPICNeo-Slavery?

War Against Mass Incarceration.

2015 Lingering Effects

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WHO ARE THE AFFECTED?

Private prisons filled

with children at all

times.

Judges’ $2.6 million in

kickbacks from a for-

profit juvenile

correctional facility.

KIDS’ CRIMES: Swiping a jar of

nutmeg

Throwing a

piece of steak.

POLICIES Three strikes laws.

Zero-tolerance policies. Criminalizing kids’

conduct.

2015 PROFITSPrison-Industrial Complex

Calling on Wells Fargo to Divest From For Profit Prisons

Drug War Facts: Racial Profile and Demographic Characteristic

Prevalence of Cocaine and Crack Use in the US, 2012, by Demographic Characteristics

Numbers in Thousands

Demographic Characteristic

Cocaine (Total) Crack

Lifetime Past Year

Past Month

Lifetime Past Year

Past Month

Total 37,688 4,671 1,650 9,015 921 443

Age

12-17 265 180 30 34 19 *

18-25 4,267 1,600 398 34 19 *

26 or Older 33,156 2,890 1,222 8,327 762 405

Gender

Male 22,757 3,298 1,231 6,214 699 329

Hispanic Origin and Race

Not Hispanic or Latino

33,030 4,005 1,481 8,070 888 428

White 28,583 3,160 1,009 6,306 579 231

Black or African-American

2,978 552 336 1,417 252 157

American Indian or Alaska Native

286 37 24 52 7 *

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

71 * 2 18 * *

Asian 507 98 58 68 17 17

Two or More Races

605 123 52 209 34 24

Hispanic or Latino

4,658 666 169 945 33 15

*: Low precision; no estimate reported.

Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Results from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Detailed Tables. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2013, Tables 1.29A and 1.34A. - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Cocaine#sthash.XoSSne1l.dpuf

Three historical factors have created lingering effects underpinning…national discriminatory mindset…[including] the 13th amendment to the Constitution [ostensibly] creating permanent abolishing of slavery…factual freedom for former slaves stymied by “except as punishment for crime” loophole.

–The Bishop’s Task Force on Racial Profiling.

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Thus far, OPJ Organization has discerned no other organizational movement toward amending the ‘exception’ language of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery: THE CONSTITUTIONAL ROOT of mass incarceration. The time is now.

OPJ mission goal:Amend the 13th Amendment

“Seeking to transform unjust structures…”

“There is a huge gap in legal

approaches to fight mass

incarceration.” -Lawyers’ Committee for Civil

Rights Under Law.

Compare the above statistics on drug use by race/ethnicity to the rate of incarceration by race, below:

The United States accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population but houses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. It costs nearly 4 times as much to keep an inmate in jail for a year as it costs to send a child to school. The bill: $69 billion each year to maintain prison systems. 1 in 15 American men is behind bars. Is this state of affairs mere happenstance? What are some root legal authorizations of incarceration patterns and practices? U.S. Supreme Court Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62, Va (21 Gratt.) 790, 796 (1871) “During his term of service in the penitentiary, [the convict] is in a state of penal servitude the state…He is for the time being a slave of the State.”

Georgia Convict Leasing1868-1971

Police Enforcers + Justices + Business Profits = Slave Incarceration labor without pay.

There are, of course, other ways to dismantle the carceral state. Indeed, history shows us that we ended the brutal convict leasing system of the Post-Civil War era not by going to the polls but by grassroots and legal activism.

-Heather Ann Thompson

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From…

“…shall have been duly convicted…”

PROFITEERING From 13

th Amendment to -New Jim Crow

-Lawful Racial Profiling -Debtors’ Prison

-John Pace plantation -Factories

-Sweat shops -Corporation-owned prisons

-Prison stock investments -Stop and Frisk and other

policing practices

“…duly convicted…”

...to Prison Re-enslavement

13th Amendment

The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to

World War II –Douglas A. Blackmon

Part III – History How did we get here? What milestones, events, and developments have brought us to this place?

21 Century Prison Industrial Complex 13

th Amendment “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have

been duly convicted…”

Mandatory sentencing laws

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The Lingering Effects 1787 – 2014Language of the Constitution

1. Article I; Section 2; Paragraph 3

"3/5ths of a whole person.

A ranking in law comparatively more/less 'human' than others?

2. XIII Amendment

"except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been has been duly convicted.”

As the system of American prison slavery was honed,

the controversy raged over the practice of chattel

slavery. At the close of the Civil War, the controversy focused on the wording of

the Constitutional Amendment to legally

abolish slavery. Led by Massachusetts

Senator Charles Sumner, those who argued for the

complete abolition of slavery in the United States

lost their struggle. The Thirteenth Amendment as it was passed, and as it stands,

forbids slavery "except as a punishment for crime."

Rather than legally abolishing slavery, the

amendment changed the system to permit the state,

not private citizens, to be slave owners…”

-Excerpt.The Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes.

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000

An online report at www.democracynow.org website indicates that Ferguson residents challenge a modern “debtors’ prison” scheme that targets Blacks with fines and arrests and then locks them up when they cannot pay. “Fines and fees were the city’s second-largest source of income in fiscal year 2014. Ferguson issued on average nearly three warrants per household last year — the highest number of warrants in the state.” The results of a Stanford research project on the topic of ‘search and frisk’ showed that 52 percent of participants who believed prisons were ‘less-black’ signed the petition against ‘stop and frisk’ practices, in contrast with only 27 percent of those in the ‘more-black’ group. The study's authors concluded that "the Blacker the prison population, the less willing registered voters were to take steps to reduce the severity of a law they acknowledged to be overly harsh."

___________

Prison Slavery: A Personalized History Article - The Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery.

Southern Changes. Journal of the Southern Regional Council Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000

“Our friend Thony is locked up for a sentence of 481 years in an infamous Southern plantation-style prison. He spends his days with a swing blade cutting grass on the edge of ditches over the 20,000-acre prison. For his labor he is paid two cents per hour. One penny per hour is banked until his parole consideration (2070); the other is his to spend at the prison store.

“Mary Louise sews blue stripes down the pants legs of prison uniforms at the garment factory near the women's prison. For her eight hours a day she is paid nothing. She begs stamps from friends

to write to her children.

“Charles stands, day after day, in front of a machine, watching it stamp out license plates. The work is monotonous, and he is paid nothing for it. The prison tells him he is building "work skills." But since license plates are only made in prison industries, he is not being prepared for any work in the outside market.

“Frank sits on death row. Day in, day out, he is, for all practical purposes, idle. Television, exercise, writing letters, and playing checkers pass the time. Frank, though young, strong, and energetic, is not allowed to work. He has spent the past ten years of his life unable to do anything of use to anyone. Thony, Mary Louise, Charles, and Frank, like more than two million men, women, and children in the United States, cannot control their own labor. They are slaves.

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In 1957, forty-one prisoners at the Buford Rock Quarry [Georgia] broke their own legs with their sledge hammers to protest harsh working and living conditions. When the investigations promised by prison officials never took place, a second and then a third group of prisoners broke their own legs. As recently as 1979, a number of prisoners at the Wayne County "Correctional Institution" cut their own Achilles tendons in protest of harsh and demeaning working conditions.

-Excerpt. The Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes.

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000

Hog-tied Floggings

Mutilations Executions

Brutality Pay-to-Stay Fees

.

“Slavery is, of course, not a fashionable word in the early days of the twenty-first century. We assume ourselves to be rid of it. But an often-overlooked fact of U.S. political life and history is that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not abolish slavery in this country. It simply narrowed the practice…Prisoners are, by mandate of the United States Constitution, slaves.

“In the 1970s, the terminology of the prison system started to change. We began to have "Correctional Institutions," -Diagnostic and Classification Centers," "Youth Development Centers," etc. Wardens became "Superintendents;" guards became "Correctional Officers;" prisoners became "inmates." Solitary confinement, or the "hole," became the "Adjustment Center?' The language of scientific penology attempts to mask harsh reality.

“Some of the tough talk of recent years has abandoned the "new" penology and reverted to the chain gang approach. But whatever words we use for the system or its captives, prisoners are people from whom most rights of citizenship have been taken. They have no right to control where they are, with whom, or how they spend their time in forced labor or forced idleness. Whether we say they are given over to the prison system to be "corrected," "rehabilitated," or "incapacitated," the fact remains that they are in the system to accomplish one goal: punishment.

“Why? And for whom? Can we be satisfied to live with the commonly held assumption that people are in prison solely because they have done bad things? If this assumption were true then why would there be such wide variation in incarceration rates around the world and even within the United States? The United States goes back and forth with Russia for the distinction of being the world's number one jailer. That is to say that the U.S. depends more than any other government in the world on caging people as a response to our problems. In recent decades, we have closed mental hospitals, addiction services, and community programs for the retarded and the disabled, not to mention support services for families, children, and the elderly. After the Civil War, Southern planters thought themselves lost without their slaves. The one legal form of slavery still available to them was imprisonment. Some states passed "Black Codes." Georgia and other states passed vagrancy laws, and similar statutes and ordinances as a way to lock up black people who were seen not to be in their "proper" place. “In 1868 Georgia established by law the convict lease system modeled after the Massachusetts system begun in 1798. Convicts could be leased to counties or county contractors for use on public works. In 1874 the Georgia law was altered to permit leasing convicts to private individuals and companies. By 1877, Georgia had 1.100 prisoners: 994 (90 percent) of them were black.

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“Prisons and jails have become the one-stop solution for all our problems. There are, in many states, more mentally ill people in county jails and state prisons than in hospitals. Most expressions of 'deviance" has been criminalized and the criminal control system is supposed to take care of it all.”

-Excerpt. The Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes.

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000 At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Revlon, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many

more. -May 17, 2013. Teamsters Nation Blog

Corporations using prison labor to grab even more cash.

“I will never forget my first visit to the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville in the spring of 1978. We drove onto the prison "reservation" and there, as far as I could see, were groups of men (mostly black) bent over working in the fields. Over them sat a uniformed white man on horseback with a rifle across his lap. I was utterly amazed; nothing in my formal education had prepared me to see this contemporary picture of slavery. Indeed, the privilege inherent in my formal education had contributed to my inability to see. -Excerpt. The

Rev. Murphy Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes. Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000

“In 1878, former Confederate Colonel Robert Alston, serving as state representative from DeKalb County, visited convict work camps all over the state. As head of the Committee on the Penitentiary he wrote a scathing report: "The lease system at best is a bad one, and seems to have been forced upon the State by an inability to provide for the great increase in the number of criminals growing out of the changed relations of labor. To turn the prisoners over to private parties, who have no interest in them except that which is prompted by avarice, is to subject them to treatment which is as various as the characters of those in charge and in many cases amount to nothing less than capital punishment with slow torture added." Alston encouraged leading citizens to withdraw from the companies leasing convicts. Before long, a man who leased convicts murdered Colonel Alston. “As difficult as it must have been in the harsh days of, the post-Reconstruction era,, the black community found various ways to protest the lease system. One of their methods was an annual memorial service and "decoration of the grave" for Alston as the first white person to "condemn and denounce the workings of the abominable, blasphemous and vile penitentiary lease system, under which so many of our race are doomed to horror, agony, and pollution." “In 1908 the Georgia Prison Commission reported that, in the penitentiary and chain gangs combined, there were 4,290 Negro males, 209 Negro women, 461 white males, and six white women. “In that same year a committee report to the legislature on corruption and cruelty in the lease system led the legislature to abolish the lease. After that, chain gangs worked on public works rather than for private individuals and companies. But abuses continued. One infamous warden used to send black trustees with a pitchfork to make the hogs squeal so that the townsfolk would not hear the human screams as the warden beat a prisoner with hosepipe. Submission to the "fate of the lower classes" seems to have continued as an agenda in the prisons. Excerpt – The Rev. Murphy

Davis. Prison Slavery. Southern Changes. Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000

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Many Americans have been startled by what appears to be an upsurge in reported police shootings of unarmed African American men. However, as one who spent the bulk of his adult life in law enforcement, l don’t believe we are actually seeing an increase in these type incidents, but a continuation of what has always been happening.

The advent of cell phones with cameras and recording capabilities, now permit witnesses to police/citizen confrontations to quickly capture and disseminate unedited depictions of such incidents via social media.

This has forced major outlets to broadcast questionable police actions and behavior that otherwise may have gone unreported.

Excerpt – Clarence Edwards, Vice-Chair, OPJ

“A Historical Perspective on American Policing.”

Racial profiling is an example of procedural injustice.

Excerpt – Clarence Edwards, Vice-Chair, OPJ

“A Historical Perspective on American Policing.”

A Historical Perspective on American Policing By Clarence Edwards, Vice Chair, OPJ and Career Officer in Law Enforcement

Today’s covert and much more subtle forms of racism are still very much in evidence to African Americans. Race continues to influence how people of African descent in the United States are treated by law enforcement. There appear to be historical connections to the duties of law enforcement officials during African chattel slavery and the immediate aftermath of slavery’s abolishment to today’s ongoing frictions between the police and members of the African American community. Slave patrols in the American South were tasked with preventing runaways, enforcing slave codes and with detecting possible slave revolts. African slaves had no Fourth Amendment rights.

Racism has been a systematic feature of American society and all of its institutions. This fact is seldom if ever discussed between people of this nation’s different races. Although the overt and blatant racism expressed by then U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 is no longer as evident, as when he opined in part on March 6, 1857, that “Blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Zero tolerance policing tactics is not a new phenomenon in the Black community. Walking, jogging or driving while black frequently subjects innocent African Americans to questioning and stop and frisk protocols by the police.

When questioned about these racially disparate practices some of the nation’s most prominent law enforcement officials indicate these tactics have led to a reduction in crime and should not be discontinued despite the fact that weapons are infrequently seized during such stops. One should never forget that many American police forces in the not too distant past were tasked with enforcing both De Jure and De Facto racial segregation laws and customs wherever they were directed to by the majority White population. The legacy of these disparate racial practices by the police are not easily forgotten, and contribute to the current distrust of police by numerous Blacks.

African Americans across America are aware of and concerned about the ongoing bias based racial profiling by members of some police departments in initiating traffic stops and field contacts. Such actions diminish the trust between the police and African Americans and other minorities. Personnel prejudices or partiality on the part of police officers that interferes with their professional judgment, and is counter to departmental policy and training has no legal place in law enforcement.

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African American community suspicions

about the police can be critiqued by the

community carefully answering the following

questions: 1. How does this segment of

the community view its police force?

2. Does the organizational culture within your local police force permit its members to engage in bias based racial profiling?

3. Are current unbiased law enforcement policies and procedures adequate?

4. Do your local police department’s entry level and in-service training curriculums have a component that clearly defines biased based policing for all sworn and non-sworn members and prohibit such practices?

5. ls your local department’s current early warning system adequate to quickly detect and correct allegations of biased policing if citizen complaints are received about this issue?

6. Does this early warning system contain a statistical reporting format that is monitored by a designated official within your local department’s police force and then discussed with senior staff members and the chief of police? Excerpt – Clarence Edwards, Vice-Chair, OPJ Brain Trust of Scholars.

PERSPECTIVE: Most Importantly, how can “Never Again” be insured? MENDING FLAWS: CRIMINAL JUSTICE ANALYSIS ln attempting to analyze why America’s criminal justice system doesn’t work for Blacks, and continues to send a disproportionate number of Black males to prison, concerned citizens should focus their attention on the following areas in education:

A careful review of current K-12 teacher academic and interpersonal skills preparation.

Recruiting more Black male teachers to teach in predominantly minority public schools.

A careful monitoring of the ability of K-12 public schools to adequately prepare students for advanced technical training, higher education and the work place.

The elimination of harsh and disparate school discipline for Black students for relatively minor infractions.

Mandating that police resource officers in K-12 public schools not handle non-violent students as criminal offenders.

To greatly diminish the current frictions between the police and African Americans, concerned citizens should demand the following:

Require local, county and state governments to develop a testing instrument that can detect implicit and explicit racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation biases that could impact the ability of job applicants for law enforcement positions to treat people fairly and eliminate all such applicants from further job consideration.

Demand that law enforcement training curriculums contain specific non bias training in interpersonal skills and how to de-escalate police/citizen confrontations .

Demand that proper supervision is available to both sworn and non-sworn law enforcement personnel.

Ensure that proper discipline is enforced within law enforcement organizations. – Clarence Edwards, Vice-Chair, OPJ Brain Trust of Scholars.

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Growing up…, I often wondered why my father hitched his wagon to the party of Lincoln. Although it was the party in power that ushered in freedom from slavery, created the Freedmen’s Bureau and opened the door for black males to vote, it also gave power to the states to regulate their own affairs which, in-turn, gave birth to black codes, uncontested lynching, separate but unequal and segregation in a country with the creed "all people are created equal". To be a "conservative"… means returning to yester year. A time when states rights prevailed, therefore, giving birth to Jim Crow, devaluation of the black vote, institutionalized slavery by way of incarceration, and second class citizenship upheld by state law. -James A. Dula, PhD; Member, OPJ Brain Trust of Scholars.

The Urban Institute

The Prison Population Forecaster How can policy makers reduce incarceration rates without risking public safety? By making greater use of house arrest, probation, or parole; which would still keep convicts under the government's watch. Research shows that people tend to age out of crime, so letting them out of prison earlier likely wouldn't increase crime rates. www.vox.com/2015/8/

PERSPECTIVE: 13TH Amendment OPJ - MAJOR PROBLEM STATEMENT: The ‘duly convicted’ requirement of the Thirteenth Amendment ‘except as punishment for crime’ of the U.S. Constitution is the fundamental authorization for the legal incarceration of the massive 2.2 million men, women, and children behind bars today. The authorization continues slavery-for-profit beyond 1865 and enables the modern creation of a Prison Industrial Complex. Among the base mission goal of The Organization on Procedural Justice is to amend the legal flaws of the Thirteenth Amendment language authorizing prisoners as ‘slaves of the state’

MENDING FLAWS: SOLUTIONS IDENTIFICATION What is the role of The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in both the prison neo-enslavement of persons duly convicted of crime, its statistics, racial disparities, its evolution into private prison profiteering and the economics of indigent defense; police practices; debtors’ prisons; “crimmigration”; sentencing reform; over-criminalization and the growing host of criminal justice issues.

Research-Based Actions: Planning Realities Concerning mass incarceration, what realities would be maintained and how much should the country and states reduce their punishment for violent crimes?

Action Recommendations OPJ recommends the formation of OPJ partnerships;

specifically with The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; law schools (especially HBCUs) and other law reform organizations like the Urban Institute, NAACP, and The National Bar Association.

OPJ substantially add to TEC Legislative Committee 08 economic capacity for underwriting the costs of law reform via an OPJ grant application to the Ford Foundation which funds systemic reform litigation whereof organizational partnerships have been established to achieve major systemic reform results.

TEC specifically establishes a national partnership with The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the effort to achieve the goals outlined in 2015 Resolutions AO11, CO19 and C005.

CONSULT the Prison Population Forecaster, the Urban Institute.

The Urban Institute has developed a Prison Population Forecaster instrument that, for all offenses, measures the effect of certain actions on the percent aggregate reduction in prison populations in fifteen pilot states. For example, reducing length of stay by 50 percent would “bring the aggregate prison population down 185,456 (39%) by December 2021--compared with the baseline projection of 474,248--if no length of stay reduction action is taken.”

www.vox.com/2015/8/14/9156355/mass-incarceration-chart

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Below are four #Ferguson related pieces of legislation. 1. Stop Militarizing Law

Enforcement (H.R. 5478) Rep. Hank Johnson, D-GA. A week after Michael Brown was shot to death by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, Rep. Hank Johnson announced he would draft a bill to end Pentagon Program 1033. Johnson was one of 8 Black Caucus members who voted against funding the DoD program in June. On September 16, Johnson dropped his bill, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014. There are four Republicans on this legislation. “Before another small town’s police force gets a $750,000 gift from the Defense Department that it can’t maintain or manage, it behooves us to press pause on Pentagon’s 1033 program and revisit the merits of a militarized America.” Rep. Johnson’s bill would: — Prevent transfers of equipment inappropriate for local policing, such as high-caliber weapons, long-range acoustic devices, grenade launchers, armed drones, armored vehicles, and grenades or similar explosives, — End incentives to use equipment in circumstances when the use is unnecessary. Under the 1033 program, local police are required to use the equipment within a year.

— Require that recipients certify that they can account for all equipment. 2. The Transparency in Policing Act (H.R. 5407) Rep. Al Green, D-TX. Green’s bill would, “require state and local law enforcement agencies that receive funds from the Department of Justice to acquire body cameras for use by their law enforcement officers.” Numerous police departments… have conducted studies on body cameras and they have gotten positive results. The bill was introduced on September 8, 2014

in the wake of the Ferguson story.

PERSPECTIVE: “…Last year more people were killed by police in the U.S., 461, than in over thirty years. Oddly the cases of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and others happen at a time when crime rates are at their lowest points in a generation…

Lauren Victoria Burke is a Washington, D.C.-based political reporter.

MENDING FLAWS: NEW LEGISLATION PROPOSED The recent Senate passage of H.R. 1447, the Death in Custody Reporting Act, was an early win for #BlackLivesMatter. The bill— which requires police departments to report all deaths during arrests and in custody to the Department of Justice—was authored by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and signed into law by President Barack Obama on Dec. 18. “Hopefully when we get information, we can figure out how to reduce the numbers of people dying,” said Scott about the legislation. The bill requires the DOJ to review deaths at the hands of police and to make policy recommendations. Here are five other pieces of federal legislation set to be presented.

1.The Grand Jury Reform Act: In cases of officer-involved shootings, this bill, introduced by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), would require the appointment of a special prosecutor charged with conducting a public probable cause hearing when there is evidence of a crime. After the revelations that St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch acoustic devices, grenade launchers, armed drones, armored vehicles, and grenades or similar explosives.

2. The Camera Authorization and Maintenance Act: Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) will author a bill requiring all state and local law-enforcement agencies that receive Department of Justice grants to have their officers wear body cameras. The bill also requires that cameras be studied for effectiveness and mandates a report to Congress on the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, through which excess military equipment is turned over to many local police departments. Numerous police departments around the country have conducted studies on body cameras and have gotten positive results.

3. The Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act: A week after Michael Brown was killed, Rep. Johnson announced that he would draft a bill to end the DOD 1033 Program. On Sept. 16 Johnson offered his bill. Johnson was joined by four Republicans on the legislation. Unlike Cleaver’s legislation, Johnson’s is designed to end the 1033 Program, not just provide oversight. The bill would prevent transfers of high-caliber weapons, long-range acoustic devices, grenade launchers, armed drones, armored vehicles, and grenades or similar explosives.

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3. Death in Custody Reporting Act (H.R. 1447) Rep. Bobby Scott, D-VA. That this bill is necessary is a statement in itself. Believe it or not police departments are not required to report a death in custody. In 2013, 461 (we think…) people were killed by the police — the most in 30 years. This legislation has passed the House and cued up in the Senate and could pass this week (waiting for the Republicans…). The legislation requires police departments, “to report to the Attorney General on a quarterly basis certain information regarding the death of any person who is detained, arrested, en route to incarceration, or incarcerated in state or local facilities or a boot camp prison. Imposes penalties on states that fail to comply with such reporting requirements The bill also, “requires the head of each federal law enforcement agency to report to the Attorney General annually certain information regarding the death of any person who: (1) is detained or arrested by any officer of such agency (or by any state or local law enforcement officer for purposes of a federal law enforcement operation); or (2) is en route to be incarcerated or detained, or is incarcerated or detained, at any federal correctional facility or federal pretrial detention facility located within the United States or any other facility pursuant to a contract with or used by such agency.” [Passed by Cong. 12/2014]. 4. The End Racial Profiling Act (H.R. 2851) Rep. John Conyers/Sen. Ben Cardin. Conyers’ site reads, “Recent events demonstrate that racial profiling remains a divisive issue that strikes at the very foundation of our democracy. Though the death of Trayvon Martin was not the result of a law enforcement encounter, the issues of race and reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct are so closely linked in the minds of the public that his death cannot be separated from the law enforcement profiling

debate.- Lauren Victoria Burke

4. The Transparency in Policing Act: This bill, introduced by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), would be a lightweight alternative to the bill offered by Cleaver on body cameras. Often, especially in a gridlocked Congress, a bill with fewer oversight requirements is an easier sell. Green’s legislation requires body cameras and also requires the DOJ to study the use of these cameras by law allowed a witness who had already been discredited by the FBI to appear, several experts have said that an independent-prosecutor bill is essential. 5. The End Racial Profiling Act: As the name indicates, this legislation seeks to protect minority communities from the use of racial profiling by law enforcement. The bill mandates training on racial-profiling issues and links state grant money to effective policies on the issue. In a statement, co-sponsor Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said, “Recent events demonstrate that racial profiling remains a divisive issue that strikes at the very foundation of our democracy. Though the death of Trayvon Martin was not the result of a law-enforcement encounter, the issues of race and reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct are so closely linked in the minds of the public that his death cannot be separated from the law enforcement profiling debate.” Even though Attorney General Eric Holder issued new racial-profiling guidelines [before he left office], they restrict profiling only in federal cases, and many elected officials were not happy that the guidelines still allow profiling by many local jurisdictions. -Lauren Victoria Burke is a Washington, D.C.-based

political reporter

47 percent of Americans gave their police precinct a grade of D or F. Thirty-seven

percent gave an F grade [showing in orange states]. -Fractl

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-Victor M. Rios 2011

“Aggressive policing…can literally change the way [kids’] brain functions,” says Professor Leaf at Johns Hopkins University.

Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration Harsh criminal-justice policies have thrown America's poorest urban communities into chaos.

How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America. -Heather Ann Thompson, Author and Professor, Johns

Hopkins University

The 14th Amendment, when combined with the War on Crime, has paradoxically disenfranchised vast swaths of the population and given the rural, white areas surrounding the prisons unforeseen political power. With so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted. The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime. From Voting Rights to the War on Crime The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government a number of meaningful tools with which it could monitor state elections and make sure that states with a particularly grim history of discriminatory voting practices would make no voting policy without its approval. The act had been intended to combat the intimidation and legal maneuvers—such as passage of poll taxes, literacy requirements, and so-called “Grandfather clauses”— that had left only 5 percent of black Americans, by the 1940s, able to vote, despite passage of the 14th and 15th amendments after the Civil War. But the very same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he also signed another Act into law: the Law Enforcement Administration Act (LEAA), a piece of legislation that, well before crime rates across America hit record highs, created

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From the War on Crime to Mass Incarceration Thanks to America’s post-1965 commitment to the War on Crime, and more specifically, thanks to the dramatic escalation of policing in cities across the nation as well as the legal changes wrought by an ever-intensifying War on Drugs,

…between 1970 and 2010 more people ended up in prison in this country than anywhere else in the world. At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.

-Heather Ann Thompson is an associate professor of African

American studies and history at Temple University.

And, because of the 13th

Amendment, which allowed the continuation of slavery

for those who had committed a crime,

…thousands of newly imprisoned black

southerners were forced to work for free under the

convict lease system. This nation’s incarceration rate was hardly color blind. Eventually one in nine young black men were locked up in America…

-Heather Ann Thompson

the bureaucracy and provided the funding that would enable a historically and internationally unparalleled war on crime. So, at the very same moment that the American Civil Rights Movement had succeeded in newly empowering African Americans in the political sphere by securing passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s white politicians decided to begin a massive new war on crime that would eventually undercut myriad gains of the Civil Rights Movement—particularly those promised by the Voting Rights Act itself…

....At no other point in this nation’s recorded past had the economic, social, and political institutions of a country become so bound up with the practice of punishment.

By the year 2007, 1 in every 31 U.S. residents lived under some form of correctional supervision.

By 2010, more than 7.3 million Americans had become entangled in the criminal justice system and 2 million of them were actually locked up in state and federal prisons.

By 2011, 39,709 people in Louisiana alone were living behind bars and 71,579 were either in jail, on probation, or on parole.

And this was by no means a “southern” phenomenon. In Pennsylvania, 51,638 people were actually locked behind bars in 2011 and a full 346,268 lived under some form of correctional control by that year.

The nation’s decision to embark on a massive War on Crime in the mid-1960s has had a profound impact on the way that American history evolved over the course of the later 20th and into the 21st centuries. As we now know from countless studies, such staggering rates of incarceration have proven both socially devastating and economically destructive for wide swaths of this country—particularly those areas of America inhabited by people of color. This nation’s incarceration rate was hardly color blind. Eventually one in nine young black men were locked up in America and, by 2010, black women and girls too were being locked up at a record rate. Diluting our Democracy So how did this overwhelmingly racialized mass incarceration end up mattering to our very democracy? How is it that this act of locking up so many Americans, particularly Americans of color, itself distorted our political process and made it almost impossible for those most affected by mass incarceration to eliminate the policies that have undergirded it at the ballot box? The answer lies back in the 1870s and in a little-known caveat to the 14th Amendment.

-Heather Ann Thompson

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What has it really cost the United States to build the world’s most massive prison system? To answer this question, some point to the nearly two million people who are now locked up in an American prison—overwhelmingly this nation’s poorest, most mentally ill, and least-educated citizens, and THEN ponder the moral costs. Others have pointed to the enormous expense of having more than seven million Americans under some form of correctional supervision and argued that the system is not economically sustainable.

Still others highlight the high price that our nation’s already most fragile communities, in particular, have paid for the rise of such an enormous carceral state. A few have also asked Americans to consider what it means for the future of our society that our system of punishment is so deeply racialized. -Heather Ann Thompson

OHIO COSTS IN FISCAL YEAR 2010, The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) had nearly $1.27 billion in prison expenditures. The state also had $50.5 million in prison-related costs outside the department’s budget. The total cost of Ohio’s prisons—to incarcerate an average daily population of 50,960—was therefore more than $1.32 billion, of which 3.8 percent were costs outside the corrections budget.

Diluting our Democracy So how did this overwhelmingly racialized mass incarceration end up mattering to our very democracy? How is it that this act of locking up so many Americans, particularly Americans of color, itself distorted our political process and made it almost impossible for those most affected by mass incarceration to eliminate the policies that have undergirded it at the ballot box? The answer lies back in the 1870s and in a little-known caveat to the 14th Amendment. Ratifying the 14th Amendment was one of Congress’s first efforts to broaden the franchise after the Civil War. A key worry among northern politicians, however, was that since white southerners could no longer rely on the notorious “three-fifths” rule to pad their own political power, they would now try to inflate their census population for the purposes of representation by counting African Americans as citizens while denying them to access the ballot. To prevent any power grab on the part of ex-Confederates, Congress decided to add so-called Section 2 to the 14th Amendment. Firstly it stipulated that any state that “denied” the vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States” would have its representation downsized in proportion to the number of individuals being disenfranchised. Secondly, Section 2 allowed for the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible citizens—without affecting representation—if they had participated “in rebellion, or other crime.” The idea here was to keep those who had committed crimes against the Union and those who might still be in rebellion against the Union from wielding political power in the wake of the Civil War. This latter provision of Section 2, however, proved damaging to black freedom—political and otherwise. Almost overnight, white southerners began policing African Americans with new zeal and charging them with “crimes” that had never before been on the books. Within a decade of the Civil War, thousands of African Americans found themselves leased out and locked up on prison plantations and in penitentiaries. Southern whites, of course, profited from these new laws politically as well as economically. By making so many blacks into convicts, whites could deny them the right to vote under Section 2 without undermining their state’s census population for the purposes of political representation. And, because of another clause of another Amendment, the 13th, which allowed the continuation of slavery for those who had committed a crime, these same white southerners were able to force thousands of newly imprisoned black southerners to work for free under the convict lease system. –Heather Ann Thompson

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By the year 2000, 1.8 million African Americans had been barred from the polls because so many felon disfranchisement laws had been passed in states across the country after 1974.

Not only were their votes not counted in that year’s

hotly contested presidential election, but by the next

presidential election a full ten states, according to The

Sentencing Project, had "African American

disenfranchisement rates above 15%," which clearly

affected the outcome of that contest as well.

By 2006, 48 out of 50 states had passed disfranchisement laws and, with more than 47 million Americans (1/4 of the adult population) having criminal records by that year, the nation’s political process had been fundamentally altered. By 2011, 23.3% of African Americans in Florida, 18.3% of black population of Wyoming, and 20.4% of African Americans in Virginia were barred from the ballot.

-Heather Ann Thompson

Fast-forward 100 years when, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, another War on Crime began that also, almost overnight, led to the mass imprisonment of this nation’s African American citizens. In 1974, as the numbers of imprisoned Americans was rising precipitously and when states once again began to disfranchise individuals with criminal convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked in a landmark case, Richardson v. Ramirez, to rule explicitly on the issue of whether it was constitutional under the 14th Amendment to disfranchise those serving, or who have served, time in prison.

The court did the same thing that many southern states did after the Civil War—it interpreted Section A of the 14th amendment very, very differently than it was intended to be interpreted. It, too, decided that disenfranchisement would be permitted when a citizen was convicted of any crime, without regard to whether such crimes might be thought of as ideologically analogous to rebellion or were more likely to affect African Americans than others. Notably, Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented vigorously in this case. The purpose of Section 2, he argued, was clearly to enfranchise, not disenfranchise, former slaves and their descendants. Marshall’s fellow members of the bench, though, felt that their decision would not have any discriminatory effect because the nation already had the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to handle this issue. And yet, the negative impact of Richardson v. Ramirez on African American voting was vast and immediate…

-Heather Ann Thompson

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Why We Should Care …Americans’ power to even rethink, let alone undo, the policies and practices that have led to mass incarceration via the franchise has been severely compromised—in no small part due to the fact that the parties that benefitted the most from the rise of this enormous carceral state are now empowered, seemingly in perpetuity, by its sheer size and scope. There are, of course, other ways to dismantle the carceral state. Indeed, history shows us that we ended the brutal convict leasing system of the Post-Civil War era not by going to the polls but by grassroots and legal activism. Nevertheless, we should all be concerned about the ways mass incarceration has eroded our democracy. Even if we don’t care about the record rate of imprisonment in this country—despite its myriad ugly consequences, its unsustainable cost, and its particularly devastating fallout on communities of color—when the principle of “one person, one vote” no longer has real meaning in a society, and when political power is no longer attained via its people but rather through a manipulation of their laws, we must all question the future of our nation.

-Heather Ann Thompson

Distorting our Democracy Disfranchising thousands of voters is only part of the story of how mass incarceration has distorted American democracy. Today, just as it did more than a hundred years earlier, the way the Census calculates resident population also plays a subtle but significant role. As ex-Confederates knew well, prisoners would be counted as residents of a given county, even if they could not themselves vote: High numbers of prisoners could easily translate to greater political power for those who put them behind bars. With the advent of mass incarceration, and as the number of people imprisoned not only rose dramatically, but also began moving urbanites of color into overwhelmingly white rural counties that housed prisons, the political process was again distorted. In short, thanks to this process that we now call “prison- gerrymandering,” overwhelmingly white and Republican areas of the United States that built prisons as the War on Crime escalated got more political power, whereas areas of country where policing was particularly concentrated and aggressive, areas in which levels of incarceration were, as a result, staggering, lost political power. Consider research by the Prison Policy Initiative showing how voters across the country gain political power from housing a penal facility.

In Powhatan County, Virginia 41% of the 5th Board of Supervisors District that was drawn after the 2000 Census were actually people in prison and in both the First and Third Supervisory Districts of Nottoway County, approximately ¼ of their population comes from large prisons within the county. In the case of Southampton County, such prison-based gerrymandering means that votes of those citizens who live there are worth almost more than twice as much as votes cast in other districts that have the required number of actual residents.

In Michigan as well, mass incarceration has meant distorted democracy. A full four state senate districts drawn after the 2000 Census (17, 19, 33 and 37), and a full five house districts (65, 70, 92, 107 and 110) meet federal minimum population requirements only because they claim prisoners as constituents.

Similarly in Pennsylvania, no fewer than eight state legislative districts would comply with the federal "one person, one vote" civil rights standard if non-voting state and federal prisoners in those districts were not counted as district residents.

-Heather Ann Thompson is an associate professor of African American studies and history at Temple University.

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'An injustice system': Obama's prison tour latest in late-term reform agenda. Reflecting on his meeting with the inmates – some of them serving “very long sentences” President Obama said he was struck by how their lives might have been different had they been born with the structural and societal support the average citizen takes for granted.

Sabrina Siddiqui, Reporter -The Guardian July 2015

‘Our kids, America’s children, so often are isolated, without hope.’ -President Barack Obama

Part IV – Legal Activism and Solutions: Dismantling unjust laws and systems. MASS INCARCERATION

Amending 13th Amendment flaws. Precedents and remedies? What challenges lie ahead?