The Pebble in the Pool

On Monday, Aug. 12, New York’s Federal Court Judge Schira Scheindlin ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a class action suit brought against the City of New York and its “Stop and Frisk” policy. Her ruling cited the unconstitutionality of the policy, which targeted mostly young blacks and Latinos, and that it was in direct violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.

She called upon the federal Department of Justice to independently monitor NYPD’s practices, and for an independent counsel to oversee development and implementation of a new law enforcement policy that protects New York’s citizens from this type of police harassment.

In a phrase, Judge Scheindlin dropped a pebble in a pool. The depth of that pool we have yet to uncover, but the ripple effect could be even more profound.

The judge’s decision found that New York’s “[Stop and Frisk] policy violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizures, as well as the 14th Amendment which guarantees ‘due process’ of American citizens.” The controversial program, begun 2004, led to 5 million stops of mostly black and Latino men. Most — 90% — were found innocent. The judge noted in these findings that Stop and Frisk encouraged targeting these young men based on prevalence in local crime complaints, and as statistics noted, not on reality. The street name for this is “racial profiling.”

When Scheindlin’s ruling was issued this week, it was hardly an inevitable outcome. After three decades of the “Right on Crime” — a conservative effort to weigh the criminal justice system against those most marginalized by society, an effort paid for by special interests — we watched as institutional oppression solidified powerfully enough to form its own industry and economy, state by state.

The criminal justice system — from police to judges to jailers — were and are the personnel in the “prison industrial complex.” It’s another in a list of institutions and the domestic and foreign policies that support them for the benefit and profit of private interests over individuals, no matter the human cost.

That complex has a goal in mind and it’s not reform. Since the 1980s when President Reagan’s ‘tough on crime’ policies beefed up law enforcement by 6%, endorsed capital punishment and slightly increased construction of federal prisons, the states’ penal systems saw growth in federal money coming back to states for law enforcement and incarceration.

Following the tax revolt of the late 1970s, any income for states was good income. When education, non-profit arts programs, social service and health service providers saw their budgets slashed in the mid to late 1980s, the same states, including mine, saw more public dollars spent capitalizing on the growth of the prison population and design and construction of prisons. These prisons employed people in economically struggling counties, providing jobs, job security and a network of facilities to warehouse people. In the meantime, our schools languished.

In the mid 1990s while Bill Clinton was in office and Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, sentencing rules changed. Populations that once lived in poor neighborhoods now lived inside four walls and under 24-hour security. That was also when the U.S. saw troubling growth in the female offender population. In fact women were the fastest rising population in our county and state prisons. Most of their crimes were related to poverty — drugs and prostitution. “Three strikes,” amongst other laws put into effect, guaranteed the social destruction of whole communities and more people being jailed. Now there’s a glut in the system and a need for more beds in private jail facilities.

And that is no accident.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a non-profit organization “composed of legislators, businesses and foundations which produces model policies for state legislatures and promotes free markets, limited government, and federalism at the state level.” ALEC drafts “model legislation” used by lobbyists and politicians to propose and enact through legislatures on the local, state and federal level. One of ALEC’s most successful pieces of model legislation was the “Stand Your Ground” law, which enabled George Zimmerman to shoot and kill 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last year in Florida.

Two of the largest for-profit U.S. prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group, are contributors to ALEC, and are responsible for making sure it develops more model laws like “Three Strikes” that guarantee arrest, prolonged tougher sentences for perpetrators of victimless crimes, and therefore a continued clientele in their private prisons. They found their niche, created their need and filled it, all on your taxpayer dime.

Yet, twenty years after federal sentencing reform laws were passed — with all these new prisons and prisoners whose maintenance costs per capita are more than someone’s annual minimum wage salary — states are taking a second look at the costs of supporting a bloated public and private prison industry. This includes law enforcement policies like Stop and Frisk, the current laws criminalizing pot and sentencing that guarantees full houses in prisons and more inmate mouths to feed. It also includes how many more people are getting executed annually in America.

The total number of people in American prisons versus anywhere else in the world is staggering. In the instances where we’ve been tops in the world we’ve lost ground on almost every front except for that. Because crime and punishment is a business in the U.S., we’re the number one jailhouse nation in the world.

It may well be that someone has started to think that it costs more to punish someone than to educate them and create an economy that employs them. That movement has been afoot for some time, but has been largely under the radar until Senator Jim Webb of Virginia started a push for prison reform in 2009.

That push, along with the surprising announcement by the Department of Justice’s change in mandatory minimum sentencing for drug possession — could well be pressure built up after these three decades of the existing legal justice system which, like the speculative mortgage industry that tanked the economy in 2008, seems too big to fail. To the minds of many young black and Latino men in New York and throughout America, that system is barely legal let alone just.

The DOJ’s shift in sentencing policy and Scheindlin’s ruling this week comes as Venus closes the door on Virgo and enters her home sign of Libra, the sign of marriage and partnership, and represented by the scales. What does that have to do with today? Beyond our relationships with our partners and our families, we each have a responsibility to the health of our communities. That relationship is in and of itself a partnership supported and protected by law. And those laws should be evenly balanced to protect all of us, not just some, and for the right reasons.

The pool where Judge Scheindlin’s pebble was thrown is deep and has taken a long time to build up. I pray that pebble is one of many creating the ripples and waves that pool needs to wash it clean, emptying out the murk that lies within. Let Venus shine her light on it. It’s time for her to hold up the scales of justice so that we can see this situation with clear eyes and heart.