Progressive Wisconsin? State Marked by Empty Factories, Full Prisons
by Roger Bybee 4 /10
Wisconsin has long enjoyed a reputation as an enlightened, progressive
state. Its reputation goes back to the populist flavor of the state constitution,
, the strong movement for the abolition of slavery, the staunchly anti-
corporate governor (and later senator) "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, the
building of powerful labor and socialist movements, and one of the nation's
very best university systems.
But a visit to my hometown of Racine for a meeting this week was a
painful reminder of how the city and state are moving toward a very
different model of society: the mass destruction of family-supporting jobs
coupled with the mass incarceration of thousands of young men who grew
up in deprived, disorganized neighborhoods shattered by de-industrializa-
tion.
GHOSTLY FACTORIES—AND A MASSIVE NEW JAIL
Unemployment in Racine is now 16.7%, reflecting both the toll of the
Great Recession and the permanent loss of about 13,500 manufacturing jobs
between 1979 and 2007, 42% of the city's industrial jobs. My hometown is filled with ghostly empty factories and vast empty, flat fields of brown grass where factories once turned out tractors, garden equipment, children's Golden Books, machine tools, auto parts, farm machinery, and on and on.
In industrial towns like Racine, factories have been emptied out, with no family-supporting jobs to replace them. Meanwhile a flock of new prisons and jails have been filled up, providing jobs for some ex-factory workers and a cell for others.Racine has a new $30 million jail that holds about six times as many prisoners as the one it replaced, which was completed only in 1980. A juvenile corrections facility now sits where the Rainfair clothing factory stood before its new owners sent the jobs to China.
PRISON POPULATION INCREASES NEARLY EIGHT-FOLD
With the path to legitimate success blocked for so many, it is only predictable that a certain percentage of young men, in particular, would be drawn to criminal activity. But unlike Wisconsin's neighbor, Minnesota, which has only about one-third the number of prisoners despite roughly similar demographics and population, Wisconsin has not developed a major system of non-prison alternatives to help young men complete their educations, obtain training and jobs, and find a non-criminal path for their lives.
Statewide, the prison population has exploded from 2,973 in 1970 to 23,112 at the end of last year, representing nearly an eight-fold increase.
A sizable portion of these prisoners come from six counties which have all suffered devastating losses in industrial jobs: Milwaukee, Dane, Racine, Kenosha, Rock and Waukesha. The city of Milwaukee lost 65% of its industrial jobs between 1977 and 2002, with leading local corporations like Johnson Controls, Master Lock and AO Smith coming to employ more workers in Mexico than Milwaukee. In Rock County, Janesville—which lost its huge General Motors assembly plant at the end of 2008—has an official unemployment rate of 13.1% and nearby Beloit has the state's highest jobless rate of 18.3%.
Wisconsin carries the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of African-American male incarceration of any state in the nation. African Americans are incarcerated at 12 times the rate of whites. At every point in the downward slide toward prison, African-Americans find less favorable treatment than whites.
The cost of the state's vast expansion of prisons and jails has meant a major drain on the revenues that once supported Wisconsin's excellent university system, forcing a quadrupling of tuition over the last 20 years, according to Jay Burseth, president of the UW-Milwaukee Students Association. It has also triggered increasingly sharp struggles by UW students to hold down tuition, as covered last month in these pages.
As economist Michael Rosen has pointed out, the link between rising prison expenditures and declining educational opportunities is clear-cut. Even while crime has been declining, the number of prisoners kept climbing:
Between 1987 and 2007, Wisconsin actually cut its support for higher education by 6%. Only 6 states reduced their investment in higher ed by more. During the same period, Wisconsin increased corrections spending by 251%, 8th highest nation, despite a declining crime rate.
MORE PRISON SPENDING MEANS HIGHER TUITON, LESS ACCESS
Ironically, the cost of incarcerating of mostly poor young men has directly and a severely reduced the opportunities for young people to stay out of trouble, get a good education and lead a productive life. The diversion of state funds from colleges and technical schools to the prison system has forced a much heavier burden of tuition on those who would like to attend college.
Rosen notes the conclusions of a study committee composed of representatives of Wisconsin's university system and technical colleges: "Wisconsin students from lower income families have less access to a college education than in the U.S. as a whole."
According to Prof. Pam Oliver of UW-Madison, a leading scholar who has done extensive research on the metastazing of Wisconsin's prison population, there has not yet been any systematic, full-scale study of the relationship between de-industrialization and the huge explosion in incarceration in Wisconsin.
But this linkage between the community devastation represented by the state's vacant factories and the crowded jails and prisons now seems brutally clear. The connection stands as a major indictment of the shameful economic and social policies shaped by major corporations' decisions and the policy choices of government officials unwilling to challenge corporate power.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus. Bybee edited The Racine Labor weekly newspaper for 14 years in his hometown of Racine, Wis., where his grandfathers and father were socialist and labor activists. His website can be found here, and his e-mail address is winterbybee@gmail.com.
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Don’t turn Wisconsin into ‘Wississippi’
When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.
These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.
Southern states rushed to enact right-to-work laws and, in short order, all the states that seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles in the South have been far more bitter and violent than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the city.
Speaking of legal, legislative and practical barriers that Southern states and cities erected to the organization of trade unions — especially in the public sector — King said: “If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
King often spoke of the link between organized labor and the civil rights movement. He recognized that the cause of freedom needed allies, and that unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the United Auto Workers were key allies in the struggle. The unions shared in that recognition, and do to this day. Visit an AFSCME or UAW hall in Wisconsin and you will see plaques and displays recalling when Wisconsin trade unionists stood with King and the civil rights movement for justice.
The Wisconsin unions were strong enough to provide that support because Wisconsin is not a right-to-work state. Like the vast majority of other states that fought to end slavery in the 19th century, and that elected representatives (Republicans and Democrats) who opposed segregation in the 20th century, Wisconsin rejected proposals to enact right-to-work laws. Wisconsin Democrats and Republicans recognized that strong unions, like strong businesses, were necessary to economic and social progress.
Now, however, some Republicans are thinking of aligning Wisconsin with the Southern states. Incoming state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, told a WisPolitics luncheon last week that lawmakers are actively discussing making Wisconsin a right-to-work state.
“We have new majorities,” says Fitzgerald. “We’ve talked to new members of the House of Representatives and the way they view the world right now is the more feathers you ruffle right now, the stronger you’re going to be politically. I don’t ever remember an environment where that existed before. I think it gives us a lot of leeway ... to make some significant changes.”
Among the changes being discussed is an abandonment of laws that preserve the right of workers to organize unions and to make their voices heard through those unions. Gov.-elect Scott Walker has even opened up a discussion about decertifying state employee unions -- a move that would end decades of generally good relations between the state and the public employees who help when our cars break down on the highways, serve as guards in our prisons, assist unemployed moms when they are looking for work, inspect our bridges for safety, work to protect our rivers and lakes, write the curriculums for our schools, and maintain our museums and colleges.
Assembly Democratic leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, notes correctly: “During the course of a sometimes acrimonious and long campaign of almost a year, this issue (of decertifying unions and reducing collective bargaining rights) never came up.” Now, for Walker to raise the prospect before he has even taken his oath of office, says Barca, “is rather startling.”
Where are Walker and Fitzgerald getting these ideas? Not from Wisconsinites. They are jetting off to conferences of right-wing governors (where Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal serve up the policy gumbo) and legislators -- including a post-election session organized by the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. It was not in Wisconsin but rather at an ALEC session in Washington where Fitzgerald says he was “surprised how much momentum there was around that discussion” of enacting right-to-work laws.
If Fitzgerald travels to Alabama or Mississippi, we are certain he could find more arguments for right-to-work laws: lower wages, fewer benefits, a race-to-the-bottom mentality that’s great for multinational corporations if not so good for workers, their families and their communities. He could also visit some Confederate war memorials.
If Fitzgerald travels Wisconsin, however, he will find a state that has historically struck a smart balance between the demands of business and labor — and that has been on the right side of the arc of history.
Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.
Posted in Editorial on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 7:30 am Updated: 2:18 pm. Afl-cio, Labor, United Auto Workers, Martin Luther King Jr., Scott Fitzgerald, Trade Union, Scott Walker, Brad Sherman
The huffington post
Bill Quigley,Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights; Professor, Loyola New Orleans:Posted: July 26, 2010 07:45 AM
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is - are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system - from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates - according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses - according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.
Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites - according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.
Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.
Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded "All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring...The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US."
Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.
Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial - the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Mosistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received bistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!
So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.
Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans - a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow - creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.
Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.
Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. "These people", whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.
This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country's police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.
What to do?
Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.
We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?
It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says "Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system."
Bill Quigley
Bill Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and defending the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bill joined CCR on sabbatical from his position as law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977. He has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years. Bill received the 2006 Camille Gravel Civil Pro Bono Award from the Federal Bar Association New Orleans Chapter. Bill received the 2006 Stanford Law School National Public Service Award and the 2006 National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman award. He has also been an active volunteer lawyer with School of the Americas Watch and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (2003) and Storms Still Raging: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice (2008). In 2003, he was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA and is the recipient of the 2004 SALT Teaching Award presented by the Society of American Law Teachers.
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