Author: legalstudiesscholar

Part I

Part II

Part III

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic — Sam Quinones

• In this book Quinones helps readers understand how the opiate epidemic spawned heroin addiction across the country. More than half a million Americans are addicted to heroin, and many of users’ addictions can be traced to opiate prescriptions like OxyContin. The book provides a condemnation of the role of Big Pharma in mainstreaming and normalizing the use of opiate pills. OxyContin was framed as a risk-free wonder drug by salespersons and doctors, but the reality has proven to be far more sinister in nature. Quinones also examines the sprawling black tar heroin trafficking rings that trace back to small villages in Mexico. Heroin crosses the border and is delivered on demand to pill addicts in midsize cities and suburbs across the country. The addiction crisis has grown in places many wouldn’t initially expect, namely Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The drug trade and addiction crisis has had significant ripple effects on the criminal justice system and doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. A must read for anyone concerned about the growing Opiate crisis in America.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces — Radley Balko

• Balko relies on history to launch a spirited critique of domestic policing that mirrors warfare tactics more than communal supervision. The colonial days taught the Founders that soldiers in the streets beget conflict and tyranny, so in turn there was a focused effort to keep the military out of law enforcement. When we fast forward to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s however, it seems this lesson was lost on politicians. When rampant instances of police brutality provoked race riots, the coordinated responses from law enforcement agencies was the creation of SWAT units. Balko also points a critical finger at the role of the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, Clinton’s COPS program, and the post 9-11 security State under Bush and Obama, as expanding and empowering police forces at the expense of civil liberties. Balko concludes his book with suggestions for sensible reform efforts; treating drug addiction with rehabilitation, not policing, drastically scaling back the use of SWAT units, and emphasizing transparency to change the police culture. This book provides readers with a historical overview of how American policing came to be the unrelenting force that it is today.

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice — Adam Benforado

• Benforado takes readers on a journey to unearth the fundamental inequalities on which our criminal justice system is based. Many of us uncritically accept the notion that the law is impartial, but this book tosses that premise out of the window by illustrating that our system is based on injustice. Instead of arguing that the system is broken, Benforado convincingly demonstrates that the system is operating just as it was designed to by targeting undesirable defendants for extra punishment that goes far beyond constitutional blocks on arbitrary and capricious treatment. Benforado also dives into the psychological underpinnings of the criminal justice system to show the enduring role of implicit bias in the criminal justice system. Defendants with certain facial features are more likely to receive longer sentences. Judges are more likely to grant parole early in the morning.  The undeniable conclusion from this powerful book is that the roots of injustice don’t lie in the hearts of racist police officers or malicious prosecutors, but rather in the minds of all of us in society.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy — Heather Ann Thompson

• The Attica prison riot is one of the most notorious prison uprisings in global history. The true events of the saga were shrouded in mystery, but Thompson has sifted through it all to provide readers with a grueling re-telling of the events. Nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protests years of mistreatment on September 9, 1971. After four days of negotiations while holding guards and employees hostage, the state suddenly sent hundreds of heavily armed officers to retake the prison by force. Thirty-nine men were killed in the ensuing gunfire (including nine hostages killed by friendly fire), and over one hundred were severely wounded. Following the uprising prison conditions rapidly deteriorated for inmates as they were brutally retaliated against on site and in the courtroom. The Governor at the time, Rockefeller, refused to come meet the prisoners during negotiations, and plainly lied to the media that the prisoners had slashed the hostages’ throats. This vivid account of the events at Attica allows the reader to travel back in time and experience the hysteria from the inside, and the attempt at controlled responses on the outside.

Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison — Shaka Senghor

• Shaka Senghor bears his soul for readers in a gripping account of his life events that led to his incarceration, and his attempts at making amends in his post-incarceration life. Senghor was raised in Detroit’s east side during the height of the crack epidemic of the 1980’s. A good student with hopes of becoming a doctor, Senghor’s life took an unpredictable turn after his parents’ divorce. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to get by, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of 19. Battling his anger and despair during his nineteen year incarceration, seven of which were spent in solitary confinement, Senghor discovered literature and the value of human kindness. He learned tools to battle his demons by accepting accountability for his actions and forgiving all those who hurt him growing up. After his release at age thirty-eight, Senghor became a mentor and activist helping young men and women avoid the life path he went down. Writing My Wrongs is a portrait of life in the American ghetto and teaches us that our worst deeds don’t define us as a whole.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform — Catherine Y. Kim

• Increasing attention to the school-to-prison pipeline has animated responses to confronting the issue on the front line. Kim’s book attacks the narrative of at-risk youth — particularly children of color — that pushes students out of the classroom and into the juvenile justice system. The entry points to this pipeline are myriad; underfunded and under-resourced K-12 public schools, the increasing reliance on zero-tolerance disciplinary actions, and the emergence of police in schools, to name a few. The intersection of these practices threatens to prepare an entire generation of children for future incarceration. This comprehensive work attempts to study the relationship between the law at each entry point of the pipeline. By proposing legal theories and remedies to challenge the existing entry points, this book offers the hope of structuring meaningful legal reform.

CDCR will be accepting comments about the implementation of Prop 57 for the next 45 days. Overhauling the culture of CA prisons is not going to happen overnight, but Prop 57 has the potential to be a really, really good piece of legislation. Feel strongly about the need for more education programs for inmates? Let CDCR know. This our time to flex our civic discourse muscles and engage in a productive dialogue.

Inmates at San Quentin State Prison have launched a new Podcast called “Ear Hustle”. (Ear Hustle is prison slang for eavesdropping). Possibly the first podcast published from inside a prison, Ear Hustle is a groundbreaking glimpse of how the other half lives in CA. This podcast takes listeners inside prison walls and peels back the shroud of invisibility that surrounds prisons. The stories melt the stereotypes that are used to vilify prisoners. As one listens to these stories it strikes observers that the men speaking are not much different from us on the outside.

Take some time to listen to these stories, folks.

The New Yorker wrote an excellent article about the creation of the Underground Scholars Initiative at UC Berkeley. For the uninitiated observer, it may not seem like there is a pressing need for a formerly incarcerated student support group at an elite university. As it turns out however, there is a sizable population of formerly incarcerated students on campus in addition to individuals impacted by the system. The ability to retain their humanity and dignity in face of dehumanizing conditions is inspiring, to say the least. It’s even more impressive that these individuals have transcended their past transgressions to emerge on the other side with a brighter future within grasp.

Reactions to issues stemming from mass incarceration are usually dichotomous in nature. On one side, it’s common to hear rhetoric about politics of responsibility — ‘Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time.” This coalition ignores or disregards inequalities in society that often lead individuals to lawless behavior in the first place. On the other side of the continuum is the blame-the-State bloc. The government is condemning individuals to a life of crime by not giving them a fair shot at success in life. By not providing accessible or adequate means to reach their end goals in life, people are forced to take matters into their own hands to survive. The reality of the situation, of course, is a blend of the two positions.

Even the most hardline pull-yourself-up-from-your-boot-straps types would find it hard to discredit the mountain of evidence that illuminates the racial & socio-economic disparities in the criminal justice system. If you grow up in the hood you have to work twice as hard to get half as far as others. Or, as Biggie Smalls put it, “Either you slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.” Acknowledging the structural injustices, and sharing a mutual outrage, can be the start of expanding one’s capacity for empathy and solidarity. By any available metric it’s clear there are profound inequalities in society. Whether it’s the fact that supermarkets avoid ghetto neighborhoods like the plague (which creates food deserts), or the discrepancy between urban and suburban K-12 schools, or the lack of quality healthcare in city neighborhoods, or the role of the police in communities of color vs. white communities, it’s almost as if there is a colony inside of a nation. A combination of these factors, among many, many others, contributes to produce minority over representation in prisons and jails. To deny this reality is to embrace cowardice and apathy, two features that led to the events of last November.

By the same token, individuals who blame the State surely understand that personal accountability is a badge of adulthood. The State shoulders blame for creating environments that are devoid of upward mobility, but personal attitudes contribute to this conundrum. As long as guns and violence remain proxies for maturity, these attitudes will be contagious among youth.

By blending these two positions we can derive a meaningful analysis that can be applied to reform efforts. There is no doubt that the State creates atmospheres that lend themselves to lawlessness — people who have nothing are likely to do anything just to get something. Following this logic, reform should be aimed at the front end of the system to ensure fewer people ever enter the criminal justice system. Or, those who do commit crimes should be diverted to rehabilitation instead of incarceration for the sake of incarceration. Moving the discussion from theory to practice is where difficulty arises. But as long as we can correctly identify the problems, we can position ourselves for a hope of a future in which CA isn’t known for it’s penal exceptionalism.