WHAT ARE THE ODDS YOU’LL GO TO PRISON?

WHAT ARE THE ODDS YOU’LL GO TO PRISON?

Let’s have a discussion…Shall we? What is your take on the current way the criminal justice system, systematically target Blacks. Is it just by “chance” an alarming number of White Officers are gunning down young Black boys in the streets? Or is it just my imagination…Running away with me?

NUMBERS DON’T LIE!

I felt compelled to post the two YouTube videos on the topic of race playing a major role in the disproportionate statistics as they relate to the number of white males incarcerated opposed to black males.  In the interest of peace and communication, I preempted  this topic with the supporting facts and figures for us to rely on.  In general most people tend to argue about topics they know very little about.  For example, I have been in situations where I wasted my time arguing with a colleague about the theory of (2 + 2) not equaling four.   I would sit there; patiently, relying solely on reasoning to console me. But after about an hour the premise of their argument would to reduce to absurdity. I was often disturbed  by their vein attempt to rationalize their proposition. The same argument could be presented; “Is the glass half empty or is it half full?” Finally I realized after studying the Philosophical Logic of Arguments that we can sometimes get caught up in the Rhetorical dynamics of a subject. Simply put  a valid argument doesn’t have to be sound, but sound arguments have to be valid.

So who’s up for the discussion?

 

 

PEOPLE INCARCERATED ON NON-VIOLENT DRUG CHARGES ARE A BIT CLOSER TO GETTING OUT OF FEDERAL PRISON YEARS EARLY. CLEMENCY IS NOW ON THE TABLE FOR SOME DRUG OFFENDERS

Deputy Attorney General James Cole announced that the department would broaden the criteria for clemency, a move that is expected to lead to thousands of prisoners — most serving drug sentences — filing applications to President Barack Obama seeking to commute their sentences.

The changes are part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to modify sentencing laws, allowing for use of rehabilitation and other alternatives to deal with non-violent drug offenders and those who previously faced tough mandatory minimum sentences.

Attorney General Eric Holder previewed some of the changes Monday by announcing plans to assign more lawyers to handle an anticipated flood of clemency requests.

Clemency changes to free drug offenders

Obama commutes 8 crack cocaine cases

Obama commutes 8 crack sentences

Crack cocaine at heart of once-common sentencing disparity

“We are launching this clemency initiative in order to quickly and effectively identify appropriate candidates, candidates who have a clean prison record, do not present a threat to public safety, and were sentenced under out-of-date laws that have since been changed, and are no longer seen as appropriate,” Cole said at a news conference.

The clemency changes would be open to prisoners who have met a set of specific conditions: they must be low-level, non-violent offenders without a significant criminal history and must be serving a federal sentence that would likely be shorter if they were convicted today. They must have served at least 10 years of their sentence and have demonstrated good conduct in prison, with no history of violence before or during their prison term.

The pending changes are the latest step in an ongoing effort Holder calls “Smart on Crime,” which also seeks to remedy the once-common wide disparity in sentences handed down over powder versus crack cocaine, based on guidelines first enacted by Congress more than 25 years ago.

Earlier: Eric Holder seeks to cut mandatory minimum drug sentences

Of the more than 200,000 inmates in the federal prison system, some estimates show the new clemency criteria could apply to about 2,000 prisoners. But the number is likely to fall to perhaps hundreds after government lawyers review the applications.

The Justice Department says it doesn’t know how many people will end up qualifying because it depends on the applications and how they fit the new criteria. The President has final authority to decide who gets clemency.

Obama has been criticized by some civil rights groups for being stingy with his pardons and commutations. But many praised the Justice Department’s decision as a good initial step, including a coalition of groups working on sentencing guidelines.

The announcement “marks the beginning of the end of the age of mass incarceration,” said Jerry Cox, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “We must seize this historic opportunity to start the process of remedying decades of cruel and unnecessarily harsh sentencing policies.”

Cole also announced the appointment of Deborah Leff to lead the department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which has come under fire for being slow to review a backlog of applications.

Cole said the department was setting up an online application system and working with pro-bono attorneys who will assist prisoners in their applications.

Mary Price, general counsel for the group Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which advocates for changes to drug sentencing laws, welcomed Cole’s announcement. “The doors of the Office of the Pardon Attorney have been closed to petitioners for too long. This announcement signals a truly welcome change; the culture of ‘no’ that has dominated that office is being transformed,” she said.

The push to relax sentencing laws has the support of some conservative Republican lawmakers, who believe it is a way to reduce spending on federal prisons and to use alternatives to incarceration to deal with drug problems. However, lawmakers want the changes to be made through Congress rather than through the president’s executive power.

“I hope President Obama is not seeking to change sentencing policy unilaterally. Congress, not the President, has authority to make sentencing policy. He should continue to work with Congress rather than once again going it alone, and I’m willing to work with the President on these issues.” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said this week.

Cole, in his remarks Wednesday, said the issue is one of fairness. “Older, stringent punishments that are out of line with sentences imposed under today’s laws erode people’s confidence in our criminal justice system, and I am confident that this initiative will go far to promote the most fundamental of American ideals — equal justice under law,” Cole said.

Three years ago, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act to address the larger issue of drug sentencing disparities. Sentencing guidelines provided for a 100-to-1 ratio between the penalties for crack cocaine offenses versus those for powdered cocaine, but the fair sentencing law reduced the disparity to 18-to-1.

 

The U.S. Sentencing Commission recently voted to apply reduced drug penalties retroactively to over 46,000 people serving excessive sentences for federal drug offenses — potentially reducing average prison terms by two years.

The vote reflects a historic shift in the nation’s approach to substance abuse. There’s an emerging consensus among both Republicans and Democrats that using the criminal justice system to address substance abuse is both too expensive and doesn’t work in terms of promoting public safety.  Policymakers of both parties are increasingly recognizing that the war on drugs has come at a ruinous cost for all Americans, but particularly for communities of color.

THE UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION VOTED TO LET 46,290 FEDERAL PRISONS APPLY TO GET OUT OF PRISON SOONER!

The United States Sentencing Commission just voted to let 46,290 federal prisoners apply to get out of prison sooner. The vote applied the Sentencing Commission’s latest reductions in federal sentencing guidelines, APPROVED IN APRIL, to people currently serving sentences in federal prison for drug crimes.

Prisoners will begin to be released on November 1, 2015.

Prisoners will have to apply to get their sentences reduced, and each application will be reviewed, individually, by a federal judge. (One of the reasons that the Sentencing Commission decided not to start releasing prisoners until November 2015 was to give federal judges more time to work through the applications they’re going to receive.) The judge is responsible for deciding whether or not releasing the applicant would be dangerous for public safety, and whether the applicant deserves to have his or her sentence reduced.

If you have loved ones currently incarcerated on drug charges contact us at : streetjustice13@gmail.com to discuss what needs to be done to see if the new law will affect their sentence.

Maestr0

(“THE AMERICA DREAM”) IS JUST THAT FOR MOST BLACKS IN AMERICA

50 since the Civil Rights Act committed this country to narrowing the racial divide, the man of color is still being left behind. Once again, this is Maestro keeping it one hundred reporting to you live from an undisclosed location. Now if you have followed any of my work, you know that I don’t play the race card and this is by no means a plea for help. I firmly believe in order for change to occur one has to take a stance injustice and accept responsibility for his own iniquities. “God bless the child that’s got his own!” You feel me?  “Freedom comes with a price…and history has shown, it’s not cheap”. But for those of you who are trapped in a spin cycle, allow me to interject a new detergent.

 

TRAPPED IN A BUBBLE OF DESPAIR

The Black man’s chance for opportunity pales in comparison to his white counterpart; according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in a recent report, and him the American dreams is nothing more than just that…(“a dream”). It goes without saying, if the current situation maintains its course, Blacks will probably continue to suffer from lower mobility.

 

Of course it’s nice to see President Obama and the other well accomplished African Americans who have risen above the ruins of inequity to attain wealth. But during the times of slavery there were always free Black men. This isn’t just a travesty in terms of American history, it’s bad for the economy. The bottom line is, if Blacks are not given the opportunity to rise income disparity will become a lot more severe than it already is. Which will translate into a stressed labor market and a welfare system too frail to continue to survive.

 

Such stagnation isn’t just troubling in the framework of American history — it’s bad for the economy, said Richard Reeves, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. If blacks don’t have the opportunity to rise, income inequality will become more severe, labor markets more inefficient and welfare rolls more burdened.

 

Fed’s Findings

 

Bhashkar Mazumder, a senior economist and research adviser at the Chicago Fed who wrote the bank’s study, found that 50 percent of black children born between the late 1950s and early 1980s who lived in households at the bottom 20 percent of the income scale remained in the same relative position in adulthood. For whites, the comparable figure was 26 percent.

 

Conversely, about 60 percent of blacks whose parents were in the top half of the income distribution fell to the bottom half later in life. Thirty-six percent of whites showed a similar drop.

 

A labor market that fails to develop the most qualified people regardless of race makes the economy less competitive, creating a “waste of black human capital on a really quite significant scale,” Reeves said.

 

Social Assistance

 

With blacks more likely than whites to receive federal help, boosting mobility would also save taxpayers money, he said. Some 27 percent of blacks received benefits from three or more government entitlement programs in their lifetimes, compared with 14 percent of whites, a December 2012 study from Pew Research Center in Washington found.

 

“Whether you care about macroeconomic growth or global competitiveness, or whether you just have a basic notion of the United States as a place where people have equality of opportunity — in either case, you should be concerned about mobility and absolutely should be concerned about the black-white gap,” Erin Currier, who directs Pew’s work on financial security and mobility, said in an interview.

 

The disadvantages of growing up in poor neighborhoods explain up to a third of the racial gap among those sliding down the income scale, 2009 Pew Charitable Trusts research by New York University associate professor Patrick Sharkey found. Residents in those areas may have less political influence, more trouble finding or maintaining a job and more exposure to crime, the report said.

 

Poverty Rate

 

Half of black children live in communities where the poverty rate is greater than 20 percent, compared with 14 percent of whites, according to an April report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based charitable group dedicated to helping disadvantaged children.

 

While Mazumder’s research didn’t try to identify the causes of these disparities, he did find some linkages. Improving cognitive abilities by adolescence will have an effect.

 

Test scores reflect such things as how much parents read to their children, school quality and peer influences rather than inherent ability, he said. That argues for intervening early in life, according to Mazumder.

 

In addition, having two parents in the household, as only 37 percent of black children do, improves upward mobility relative to whites, Mazumder’s research showed. Seventy-seven percent of white children live in two-parent families.

 

At the same time, living with just one adult didn’t cause people to be less well-off than their parent, Mazumder found.

 

Family Composition

 

Family composition is “a big factor and maybe the largest factor” in influencing mobility, said Stuart Butler, a distinguished fellow and the director of the Center for Policy Innovation at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “When you combine that with communities where there’s an environment of pessimism, low expectations, low levels of work — as a child and as an adult, it’s harder to stick with it and do well and to take the steps needed to move up the economic ladder.”

No matter how many times I revisit this subject, it still has the same chilling affect on me but no matter what hole they drop me into, like some of that good haz…I rise! As an underdog growing up in one of the many projects in Atlanta I realized early on that it’s not about where you’ve been it’s where your at! So take a few minutes and pour that on the rocks while I take a break

Don’t forget to click on the page to follow our blog, it’s just that simple and received a notice every time we post something different. And don’t forget this is a platform for you to give me feedback, so if you don’t agree with some or all of my views drop me a line or two and let me know what’s on your mind. Unlike a bad relationship you might be trapped in, this is a two-way street.

 

CRACK COCAINE

One in every 20 federal prisoners could be eligible for early release under a potential sentencing change to be voted on Thursday for inmates convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

Congress passed a law last year substantially lowering recommended sentences for people convicted of crack cocaine crimes, ranging from possession to trafficking. The idea was to fix a longstanding disparity in punishments for crack and powder cocaine crimes, but the new, lower recommended sentences for crack offenders didn’t automatically apply to people already in prison. Now the six-member U.S. Sentencing Commission must decide whether offenders locked up for crack offenses before the new law took effect should benefit and get out earlier.

Up to 12,000 of the roughly 200,000 people incarcerated in federal prisons nationwide could be affected. A report by the commission estimates that the average sentence reduction would be approximately three years, though a judge would still have to approve any reduction.

“There is a tremendous amount of hope out there,” said Mary Price, vice president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an advocacy group for prisoners and their relatives. “There is a potential that people could see their sentences reduced, for some quite dramatically.”

At a meeting in early June, commissioners suggested they wanted to apply the lower recommended sentences to at least some past offenders, but it is unclear how many. Advocacy groups have asked for the widest possible application. But a group of 15 Republican lawmakers from the House and Senate wrote the commission saying the Fair Sentencing Act passed by Congress last year was not intended to benefit any past offenders.

At the June hearing, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder took the middle road. He expressed support for making the new, lower guideline sentences retroactive but suggested limits on who should be eligible. Holder said prisoners who used weapons when committing crimes or who have significant criminal histories should not be eligible. If the commission adopts that view it could cut in half the number of prisoners who would stand to benefit from 12,000 to approximately 6,000.

Any decision about who should be eligible for a reduced sentence will have to be approved by four of the commission’s six members, who include judges and former prosecutors. Once the commission votes, Congress has until the end of October to reject or modify the guidelines, though that is considered unlikely.

If the commission does decide to lower recommended sentences, the reductions would not be automatic. A lawyer, the overwhelming majority of them public defenders, would file paperwork in court for the prisoner seeing a reduction, and the reduction would have to be approved by a judge. Prisoners would not necessarily have to appear in court, but prosecutors would also weigh in. The earliest prisoners could start petitioning to have their sentence reduced would be November, assuming Congress does not act.

The measure the commission will consider making retroactive changed a 1986 law, enacted at a time when crack cocaine use was rampant and the drug was involved in a wave of violent crime, under which a person convicted of crack cocaine possession got the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine. The legislation reduced that ratio to about 18-1. The disparity disproportionately affects minorities — some 80 percent of those convicted of crack cocaine offenses are black.

According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, applying the change to those currently serving prison sentences for crack offenses could lead to major savings for taxpayers.

The group says the current annual per-person cost of incarceration is more than $28,000, and that retroactivity would allow for an average sentence reduction of 37 months. If all 12,040 people who would potentially be affected received the average sentence reduction, it would save taxpayers more than $1 billion over the next 30 years.