For good or bad,
the real deep effects of a Presidential reign in America are not seen for
generations. The effects of a
President’s vision for America and the laws they get passed to make that vision
a reality have real life consequences.
Consequences that the average person feels for the rest of their lives, their
children’s lives and grandchildren’s lives.
For instance,
one of the first laws that was passed with bipartisan support in the infancy of
the Clinton Administration was the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). That was quite a feat since Republicans had
fought against FMLA since 1984.
The
FMLA was introduced in Congress every year from 1984 to 1993 and was blocked
repeatedly by entrenched, well-funded opponents. For years we built and
nurtured a strong, broad-based coalition and led fierce and tireless advocacy.
Congress passed the legislation in 1991 and 1992 — but it was vetoed both times
by President George H.W. Bush…
The
end of the story is well known — the FMLA passed with bipartisan support in
January 1993 and was signed by President Clinton as the first accomplishment of
his new administration. It was a historic day for women and families, and one
of our proudest moments as an organization.
Prior to FMLA
the illness of a family member or the addition of a child could have cost you
your job. With the passage of FMLA men
were able to take an unpaid leave to contribute to the care and nurturing of
their child in the first months of their lives. Today fathers are equal partners in the
raising of their children, unlike any generation before.
One of the most
egregious effects of presidential visions for America was the “War on Drugs”
and the effects have been devastating for multiple generations.
Nixon and the Generation
Gap
In
the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and
political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their
medical safety and efficacy.
In
June 1971, President Nixon declared a
“war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug
control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and
no-knock warrants. Nixon temporarily
placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs,
pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania
Governor Raymond Shafer. In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended
decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use.
So
the placement of marijuana as a Schedule One drug, (the most dangerous drug with
no medicinal purposes) was to be temporary until a commission he appointed
could review the drug. That Republican
commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing marijuana in 1972. So what did President Nixon do?
Nixon
ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.
States
began to follow Nixon’s “war on drugs,” first with New York enacting the
draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1973. The laws, named for then-Governor
Nelson Rockefeller, required long
mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life for even first-time, nonviolent
drug offenses. Gov. Rockefeller said it was time to take a criminal justice
approach to drug policy. Other states followed New York’s example.
President Carter
ran on a platform to decriminalize marijuana.
The 1970s and Marijuana
Then,
in 1977, President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that
included marijuana decriminalization. There was even movement towards marijuana
decriminalization in Congress — in October 1977, the Senate Judiciary Committee
voted to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal
use, but the measure never received enough support to become law.
When you talk
about the effects of a presidential reign being realized generations later, you
must look at the devastation caused by Reagan’s zealous, profit driven war on
drugs.
The 1980s and 90s: Drug
Hysteria
The
presidency of Ronald Reagan marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks
to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind
bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to nearly
500,000 by 2000.
In
1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation’s
“number one problem” was just 2-6 percent. The figure grew through the
remainder of the 1980s, driven largely by the country’s fixation on
crack-cocaine, until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent –
one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in
polling history. Within less than a
year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost
interest. However, the resulting political hysteria had already led to the
passage of draconian penalties at the state and federal levels. Even as the
drug scare faded from the public mind, these policies produced escalating
levels of arrests and incarceration.
With the Reagan
crusade of war on drugs and massive incarcerations came the privatization of
America’s prisons for profit.
Prison Privatization and
the Use of Incarceration
Overview:
Private sector involvement in prisons is not new — federal and state
governments have had a long history of contracting out specific services to
private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational
training, and inmate transportation.
The 1980s, though, ushered in a new era of
prison privatization. With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the
“war on drugs” and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and
rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal
governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an
opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in
prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the
complete management and operation of entire prisons.
Today,
the privatization of prisons refers both to the takeover of existing public
facilities by private operators and to the building and operation of new and
additional prisons by for-profit prison companies. (Many of the new prisons,
additionally, are built to house out-of-state inmates.)
So the war on
drugs gave birth to a highly profitable, Wall Street profit driven prison
system. After all, who is more vulnerable
to predators than locked up people with no rights?
This gave rise to ancillary services companies
raking in the big bucks on captive consumers.
One such company
that was birthed out of Reagan’s War on Drugs is a company called Global Links.
According to Prison Legal News:
Nationwide
PLN Survey Examines Prison Phone Contracts, Kickbacks
by John E. Dannenberg
by John E. Dannenberg
An exhaustive analysis of prison phone contracts nationwide has revealed that with only limited exceptions, telephone service providers offer lucrative kickbacks (politely termed “commissions”) to state contracting agencies – amounting on average to 42% of gross revenues from prisoners’ phone calls – in order to obtain exclusive, monopolistic contracts for prison phone services.
These contracts are priced not only to unjustly enrich the telephone companies by charging much higher rates than those paid by the general public, but are further inflated to cover the commission payments, which suck over $143 million per year out of the pockets of prisoners’ families – who are the overwhelming recipients of prison phone calls. Averaging a 42% kickback nationwide, this indicates that the phone market in state prison systems is worth more than an estimated $362 million annually in gross revenue.
Prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during those time periods.
Holy cow, $362
million annually that prisoner’s families must pay or no contact. I wonder why that is so high.
The
phone contracts were reviewed to determine the service provider; the kickback
percentage; the annual dollar amount of the kickbacks; and the rates charged
for local calls, intrastate calls (within a state based on calls from one Local
Access and Transport Area to another, known as interLATA), and interstate calls
(long distance between states). To simplify this survey, only collect call and
daytime rates were analyzed.
Around 30 states allow discounted debit and/or prepaid collect calls, which provide lower prison phone rates (much lower in some cases). However, since other states don’t offer such options and not all prisoners or their families have access to debit or prepaid accounts, only collect calls – which are available in all prison systems except Iowa’s – were compared. Also, while telephone companies sometimes provide reduced rates for evening and nighttime calls, many prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during those time periods.
Around 30 states allow discounted debit and/or prepaid collect calls, which provide lower prison phone rates (much lower in some cases). However, since other states don’t offer such options and not all prisoners or their families have access to debit or prepaid accounts, only collect calls – which are available in all prison systems except Iowa’s – were compared. Also, while telephone companies sometimes provide reduced rates for evening and nighttime calls, many prisoners don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during those time periods.
Yes, prisoners
don’t have the luxury of scheduling phone calls during hours of reduced
rates. As we know from the Sentencing
Project’s article, due to the war on drugs, the privatization of prisons and the
overcrowding, many of the new prisons, are built to house out-of-state inmates.
CaaChing! Global Link makes out big time if prisoners
are shipped out of state. Their families
probably can’t afford to visit them, so phone calls are all they have. According to Global Link’s website:
HAVE
YOU RECENTLY had a loved one arrested and/or incarcerated in a County, State or
Federal facility that is "long distance" from you?
OR
ARE
YOU CURRENTLY paying $5-$20 per inmate call because they are billed
as "long distance" with "per
minute" charges?
FACT: The ONLY way
to save money on inmate calls is to have a phone number that
is "local" to your inmate's jail.
WHY? Without
a LOCAL number your cost for jail calls will include very expensive long
distance "per minute" fees, which will cost you as much as $25
per call.
FACT: Our
local numbers save you up to 80%. By
being LOCAL to the jail, they enable you to avoid the costly "long
distance" & "per minute" fees.
According to
Robert Woodson, who was a recent guest on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” Global
Links monopoly on prison telephone services includes 470 correctional systems. Global
Links pays a $40K signing contract and then prisons make $270 million/year by
charging families 7 times what outside people pay for phone calls to and from
prisons. Those companies are worth
$1.2 billion dollars.
Eric Holder’s Justice
Department has announced a new criteria for expedited clemency applications for
the victims of those unjust sentences. According to Reason Magazine:
Today
Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced new
criteria for expedited consideration of clemency applications by President
Obama, focusing on prisoners serving sentences longer than the ones currently
imposed for similar offenses. "Older, stringent punishments that are
out of line with sentences imposed under today's laws erode people's confidence
in our criminal justice system," Cole said. "I am confident that this
initiative will go far to promote the most fundamental of American ideals—equal
justice under law."
It
seems plausible that thousands of federal prisoners could meet Cole's criteria.
According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), more than 23,000
federal prisoners have served at least 10 years. Drug offenders, who account for half of federal prisoners, will be the
main beneficiaries of the new policy. FAMM estimates, for example,
that 8,800 federal prisoners could benefit from retroactive application of
shorter crack sentences enacted by Congress in 2010.
So, when Deputy
Attorney General Cole announced new clemency guidelines for releasing some of
these low level prisoners who received sentences that far outweighed the seriousness
of their crimes, it is being met with fierce resistance from the prison
industry represented by Republican Senators. From NewsMax:
According
to this article at “NewsMax”:
Senate
Republicans Rip Obama's Plan to Pardon More Drug Offenders
Wednesday,
23 Apr 2014 11:02 PM
By
Todd Beamon
Top
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday slammed President
Barack Obama for again trying to circumvent Congress with a plan to consider
clemency for more convicted nonviolent drug offenders.
Sen. Jeff Sessions called it "an alarming abuse of the pardon power."
"The president is now implementing through executive action what Congress expressly chose not to pass into law," the Alabama senator charged. "These are uncharted waters.
Sen. Jeff Sessions called it "an alarming abuse of the pardon power."
"The president is now implementing through executive action what Congress expressly chose not to pass into law," the Alabama senator charged. "These are uncharted waters.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Senate's longest-serving
Republican, said that "the president has authority to grant clemency to
certain individuals who are no longer dangerous to the community."
"But I hope President Obama is not seeking to change sentencing policy unilaterally," he added. "Congress, not the president, has authority to make sentencing policy.
The panel's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, cautioned: "The new guidelines are one thing on paper, but we'll need to see how they actually play out in practice.
"The bigger point we need to discuss is how Congress can best lower some sentences or time served and raise other sentences for crimes such as child pornography, terrorism, sexual assault, domestic violence, and various fraud offenses," he said.
Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas called for "meaningful reform of our nation's prison system," which "requires a well-thought-out proposal for using rehabilitation, jobs, and training to help prisoners re-enter society — not an election-year push with no plan to reduce their risk of becoming repeat offenders."
"But I hope President Obama is not seeking to change sentencing policy unilaterally," he added. "Congress, not the president, has authority to make sentencing policy.
The panel's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, cautioned: "The new guidelines are one thing on paper, but we'll need to see how they actually play out in practice.
"The bigger point we need to discuss is how Congress can best lower some sentences or time served and raise other sentences for crimes such as child pornography, terrorism, sexual assault, domestic violence, and various fraud offenses," he said.
Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas called for "meaningful reform of our nation's prison system," which "requires a well-thought-out proposal for using rehabilitation, jobs, and training to help prisoners re-enter society — not an election-year push with no plan to reduce their risk of becoming repeat offenders."
Yes, the GOP
doesn’t want any Administration to change the sentencing guidelines that would
cut into the profits of the GOP’s War on Drugs Prison Planet.
Let’s hope the
Holder Justice Department does not cave to the GOP demands for any sentencing changes
to be legislated through the GOP dominated congress.
So as previously
stated, for good or bad, the real deep effects of a Presidential reign in
America are not seen for generations. It’s
time to drive a stake through the heart of the Nixon/Reagan prison industrial
complex.
By Patricia
Baeten
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