Chances Are.....

Chances are you could be one of a hundred Americans
that are incarcerated. This growing problem was created
by the Republicans back in the 80's when they touted a
law and order platform. You would think that with all the
money spent on these so called think tanks they should
have seen this coming. Oh well!


For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released today by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

The steadily growing inmate population "is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime," said the report.

Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, said budget woes are prompting officials in many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections policies that might have been shunned in the recent past for fear of appearing soft in crime.

"We're seeing more and more states being creative because of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They want to be tough on crime, they want to be a law-and-order state -- but they also want to save money, and they want to be effective."

The report cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. Their actions include greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for ex-offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

"The new approach, born of bipartisan leadership, is allowing the two states to ensure they have enough prison beds for violent offenders while helping less dangerous lawbreakers become productive, taxpaying citizens," the report said.

While many state governments have shown bipartisan interest in curbing prison growth, there also are persistent calls to proceed cautiously.

"We need to be smarter," said David Muhlhausen, a criminal justice expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We're not incarcerating all the people who commit serious crimes -- but we're also probably incarcerating people who don't need to be."

According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.





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"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
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To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
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Attorneys Not Allowed?

When federal agents raided a company in the
city of Van Nuys, California seeking illegal immigrants
they blocked workers from seeing their attorneys.
This is a clear violation of the law and should be
dealt with immediately. How do you feel about
this incident?


Civil rights groups filed a petition in federal court Thursday seeking a restraining order against immigration officials who allegedly blocked workers detained in a raid at a Van Nuys manufacturing plant from consulting with their attorneys.

When the workers were interviewed by federal agents their attorneys were not allowed to be present, according to the petition filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Lawyers Guild and the National Immigration Law Center. The petition says workers were told they did not need attorneys even after they asked for one.

Department of Justice attorneys are reviewing the claim.

"During all ICE enforcement operations, aliens are afforded access to a lawyer after routine processing," said Virginia Kice, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman. "That standard operating procedure was followed during last week's enforcement."

The action comes a week after agents swept through Micro Solutions Enterprises, arresting 130 workers on immigration violations.




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Get your copy of the award winning King:
"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
tells the story of the Civil Rights
movement and the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
http://www.kingprogram.net/

Shisty Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court pulled a shisty move today by
dismissing a challenge to President Bush's
warrantless wiretapping order. Rather than make
a decision on the case that would no doubt go against
the Prez it simply dismissed the case so that opponents
would have to start the process all over again thus allowing
the order to stay in place while Bush serves out the rest
of his term. Check out the article below and let us know what
you have to say about that!


The Supreme Court today dismissed the first legal challenge to President Bush's warrantless wiretapping order, but without ruling on any of the key issues.

Since Congress is now fighting with the White House over new rule for wiretapping, the court may have chosen to stand aside from the controversy.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union had argued that this dispute went beyond whether the nation's spy agency could intercept international phone calls and e-mails. It raised the question of whether the president must abide by the law, they said.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, a Cold War-era compromise, said the president could order secret wiretapping within the United States, but only with the specific approval of a special court.

But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued a secret order to the National Security Agency that authorized it to intercept phone calls or e-mails coming into or going out of this country if there was a "reasonable basis" to believe there was a link to Al Qaeda. More significantly, the NSA did not need the approval of the FISA court to conduct this spying, according to the order.

When Bush's order was revealed in 2005, the president defended his decision as necessary for protecting against another attack within the United States. He also argued that the president, as commander in chief of the armed services, had the constitutional authority to act in the national interest, even if a law stood in the way.

The ACLU's lawyer urged the courts to take up the issue and rule that the law must be followed. "The president is bound by the laws that Congress enacts. He may disagree with those laws, but he may not disobey them," the ACLU said in the appeal to the Supreme Court.

But their lawsuit faced several hurdles before it could yield a ruling. They did not have proof that anyone in the United States had had calls or e-mails intercepted. They sued on behalf of several lawyers and journalists who had regular contact with people who were being investigated in terrorism-related cases. The lawyers said they did not feel free to contact their clients.




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Get your copy of the award winning King:
"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
tells the story of the Civil Rights
movement and the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
http://www.kingprogram.net/

We Need To Respect Each Others Opinion

Tavis Smiley gets a backlash from African Americans because
he rocked the boat of Presidential candidate Obama. This is
just the kind of behavior that has thrown the country of Kenya
into turmoil. We have simply have to learn to respect the next
man's opinion when it goes against popular opinion. Tavis Smiley
is one of this countries top African American journalist and he's
only doing his job which can only make Obama that much more
stronger. What do you think?


"There's all this talk of hater, sellout and traitor," Smiley said to me in a telephone interview. Smiley even mentioned getting death threats, but wouldn't elaborate. He said his office has been flooded with angry e-mails. "I have family in Indianapolis. They are harassing my momma, harassing my brother. It's getting to be crazy," Smiley said.

Smiley's problems started early this month after he invited Obama to speak at the State of the Black Union, an event Smiley founded nine years ago. Held annually during Black History Month and broadcast by C-Span, the event gathers a Who's Who of black intellectuals, pundits, activists, entertainers and politicians to discuss and brainstorm about where black America is and where it is headed. This year's topic is "Reclaiming Our Democracy, Deciding Our Future."

The State of the Black Union has grown into a key event for black people since its start, but as Smiley has discovered, Obama's presidential run is far more highly regarded.

As the first black person to have a legitimate shot at a presidential nomination, defeating Sen. Hillary Clinton's rich campaign juggernaut, Obama is virtually a third civil rights movement, the manifestation of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. His candidacy has produced a fervor in black America born of centuries of wanting. Nearly every black vote that Clinton thought was hers at the beginning of the race has been siphoned by Obama.

Each of the presidential candidates were invited to speak, but only Sen. Hillary Clinton accepted. Clinton is desperate to bolster her flagging campaign with a larger share of the black vote after losing all but a small percent to Obama. Smiley said he wants the candidates to focus on the issues that black Americans care about.

If the blogosphere is any reflection, however, black America believes Smiley should check his ego. Commenters would much rather see Obama campaigning against Clinton in Texas and Ohio than at Smiley's confab in Louisiana, a state he's already won. Critics burned up Internet chat rooms, taking turns at denouncing Smiley. Pundit Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an Obama supporter, authored a biting anti-Smiley opinion on TheRoot.com (which is owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive), entitled, "Who Died and Made Him King?"

A fan of Smiley commented on one blog, saying, "Tavis, Ya Killin' Me, Man." An angrier writer headlined his comment, "This is just dumb." "This man is involved in the fight of his life for the presidency of the UNITED STATES, not black states," he wrote of Obama. "I don't know if Tavis got the memo, but Hillary is leading in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the governor said that his white folks won't vote for a black." Other comments would likely be blocked by Net Nanny and can't be printed on the Web pages of a family newspaper.

For Smiley, the tumult is a major turnabout. Until now he was a darling commentator in black America. His passion for the people endeared him to many. People listened to his commentaries on the popular Tom Joyner Morning Show, and snapped up so many copies of the "Covenant" that it made the top ten lists of the both the New York Times and the Washington Post. When Smiley talked, black people listened.

"One of my friends said, 'you are being barbecued in the blogosphere,'" Smiley said. He told Black America Web writer Michael Cottman's that "I'm catching hell." In our interview, Smiley said: "This is the first time in my entire career that I have found myself in this kind of relationship with some folk in black America. I now know what it feels like to have the weight of the Internet world bearing down on you. Man, it's an eye opener when you get caught in the middle of it."

Obama's campaign said he called Smiley twice on his cell and office phones. Smiley said he returned the calls but got no response.

On the Tom Joyner Morning Show recently, Joyner brought up the controversy during an interview with Obama, relating how Smiley was taking heat for saying he thinks Obama doesn't want to talk about issues black people care about.

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Get your copy of the award winning King:
"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
tells the story of the Civil Rights
movement and the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
http://www.kingprogram.net/

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore-Defying Dixie

We have not spotlighted many books on the
subject of civil rights and so at this time let's
take a gander at the latest work by historian
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. I'm sure after reading
the article below you will want to run out and
get yourself a copy.

During the first half of the 20th century, the South routinely chased away "some of its brightest minds and most beautiful spirits," historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore notes in the introduction to her new book, "Defying Dixie." "Many of those who left did so, directly or indirectly, because they opposed white supremacy. . . . Counting them back into southern history reveals an insurgent South and shows some Southerners to be a revolutionary lot that fought longer and harder than anyone else to defeat Dixie."

Indeed, counting in these expatriates changes our view of history. And that is exactly what the Yale professor seeks to achieve with this complex, nuanced narrative of the civil rights movement before 1950.

That movement actually began, Gilmore argues, in 1919 when black soldiers returned from World War I and, in the face of violent opposition, began demanding the same freedoms at home that they'd fought for abroad. The author makes sweeping (and convincing) connections between Jim Crow segregation in the South and white supremacy in such places as Haiti and South Africa. In her retelling of history, the fight against Southern injustice moves well beyond Dixie to become a struggle for human rights that plays out in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and around the globe.

By the 1930s, Gilmore writes, African American activists and journalists had begun to sway public opinion against Jim Crow laws by successfully linking Hitler's reign of terror with domestic fascism down South. Hitler, too, compared Germany with the South -- and judged his system more humane. Echoing Hitler, one of his followers said in 1935, "The treatment of Negroes in America [is] far worse than that accorded Jews by the Nazis and America's criticism should be turned in that direction rather than toward Germany. Here in Germany we say that when a Negro is lynched for assaulting a white woman he gets what is coming to him. As we do not bother about executions of Negroes, you [Americans] should not bother when we lead a race desecrator through the streets."

With this Nazi/Jim Crow link as a backdrop, Gilmore writes, "racism had become un-American" by the mid-1940s, as World War II came to an end. Albert Einstein, deploring the second-class citizenship of black Americans, warned that "the fall of Berlin does not mean the end of fascism . . . yes, there are fascists in America, too." Around the same time, such American icons as Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra began to publicly caution against "race prejudice," which they said was better left to Hitler and his ilk. This high-profile talk of tolerance helped lay the foundation for Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement as we came to know it during the 1950s and '60s.

How that foundation was laid decades earlier is the central concern of Gilmore's narrative. Rejecting the notion that "middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation," she writes: "By giving the movement a 1950s start, we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle-class, and male roots."





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Get your copy of the award winning King:
"From Atlanta to the Mountain top
It's the 3-Hour Docudrama that
tells the story of the Civil Rights
movement and the life of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
To learn more and hear
excerpts from this treasured
program,click here:
http://www.kingprogram.net/