a newspaper that employs color-blind reporters and editors

The Detroit Free Press story reprinted at the bottom prominently mentions Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).

Thousands of worthy organizations and charities constantly buzz around us begging for our attention, our time, our money. Vleeptron would respectfully like to draw your attention to FAMM and ask you to click on its page and spend a few minutes learning about them. What you do after that is your business.

A few years ago I had the privilege to ride on a bus caravan organized by the New York City FAMM chapter for a political protest and witness. Ordinarily, the same FAMM busses meet every weekend at Columbus Circle in Manhattan and caravan north for many hours to take family members -- the busses are packed with children, mothers, fathers and grandparents -- to the Northern Tier, a belt of state and federal prisons near the Canadian border. Politicians in the largely rural and agricultural Northern Tier have invited state and federal governments to build prisons -- to create a gulag region -- as a profitable and job-generating local industry. Most of the state prisoners come from New York City and the state's other faraway big cities like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and Albany.

The Land of the Free is the world's largest prison. We have more human beings behind bars than Russia. We have more human beings behind bars than China. At last federal count, we had about 2,300,000 children, women (currently the fastest-growing segment) and men locked up in our jails and prisons.

You can talk to your broker about investing in this future growth industry, it's a huge player on Wall Street, with nearly guaranteed high returns -- corporations that build and run private prisons for state contracts, corporations that use prisoner labor. In most states, the most powerful lobby in the legislature is the prison guard union. They lobby ferociously every year for harsher drug laws and longer sentences. This brings them more prisoners and more prisons, which brings them job security for life.

Professor Angela Davis of the University of California / Santa Cruz coined the phrase: The Prison-Industrial Complex. This is how we've chosen to operate the United States of America since the 1970s.

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Letters to the Editor
The Detroit Free Press

Detroit, Michigan

To the Editor:

It is startling that in your lengthy article about mandatory minimum prison sentences, with crack cocaine mentioned in the first paragraph, the story makes no mention of the racial dimension behind crack cocaine minimum sentences ("Group Aids in Change for Drug Offenders," 26 December).

White powder cocaine is preferred by and marketed to affluent whites in the suburbs. Crack cocaine -- the identical molecule in a different consumable form -- is heavily marketed to blacks in inner cities.

Thus the law's notorious weight and sentencing disparity -- equivalent prison terms for 100 times more powder weight than crack -- has resulted in dramatically disproportionate imprisonment of blacks compared to whites.

Not everything is about race. But the crack/powder sentencing disparity is so monstrously about race that it is far beneath the standards of The Free Press to make utterly no mention of it in what seemed a comprehensive story.

It's about laws that have lasted nearly three decades, to this moment, to send far more African-Americans to prison for far longer sentences for possession of the same substance. Making no mention of the racial component of the crack/powder disparity gives The Free Press the sleaziest excuse not to ask whether federal and Michigan politicians and prosecutors knew what the shameful consequences of these laws would be.

Nor did The Free Press mention the Bush administration's stance on the crack/powder disparity in the Supreme Court. The Bush administration argued to retain the sentencing disparity and to deny judges discretion to take any defendant's circumstances into consideration to consider shorter sentences.

Robert Merkin

Northampton Massachusetts

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Wednesday 26 December 2007
The Detroit Free Press (Michigan USA)

FIGHT FOR FAIR SENTENCING
Group Aids in Change
for Drug Offenders

by L.L. Brasier, Free Press Staff Writer

As federal government officials grappled with a plan earlier this month to reduce sentences for thousands of low-level crack cocaine offenders, they were being lobbied by Michigan residents in favor of the idea.

Lots of Michigan residents.

Michigan has one of the largest and most-active chapters of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national nonprofit organization that works to repeal what many consider unfair drug and sentencing laws.

With 14,000 members nationwide, including 4,000 Michigan residents, and an annual budget of more than $1 million, the group packs a punch.

After months of lobbying by FAMM and other groups, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a body created by Congress to set federal sentencing guidelines, voted Dec. 12 to retroactively reduce the sentences of many people convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

The commission noted that crack cocaine offenses carry far longer sentences than powder cocaine ones, a disparity many have criticized. Now almost 20,000 federal prisoners nationwide are eligible to have their sentences reduced.

Michigan FAMM members, who e-mailed, mailed and called legislators in support of the change, include prisoners, former prisoners and their families, attorneys, criminal justice professors and a former Michigan governor.

"I think the trend across the country is to focus on smart justice, with an increased reliance on treatment and drug courts," said Laura Sager of the Michigan chapter of FAMM.

A decade ago, state legislators overturned Michigan's 650 lifer law following fierce lobbying by FAMM members. That law, passed in 1979, required those who trafficked in more than 650 grams of cocaine or heroin to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The law was aimed at so-called kingpin drug dealers, but instead many addicts and low-level drug couriers got life sentences.

Along the way, FAMM converted William Milliken, the former Michigan governor and moderate Republican who signed the 650 lifer legislation into law, an act he later said was the biggest mistake of his administration.

Today, Milliken is an active member of Michigan's FAMM chapter, lobbying, writing and speaking about the need to implement smart justice by allowing judges more discretion in how people are sentenced.

"The law I signed turned out to be harsh and vindictive and unfairly treated a number of people who were addicts who didn't deserve that kind of punishment," Milliken said in a recent interview.

FAMM member Barbara Pearson was 42 and a heroin addict in New York, supporting her habit in the early 1990s by mailing drugs to a dealer in Michigan. She was arrested by Michigan authorities and pleaded guilty to 10 counts of delivery of heroin. Pearson, a first-time offender, was sentenced to 50 to 200 years in prison. Her codefendant, who turned her in, got a 2- to 20-year sentence.

FAMM became interested in her case and successfully sought a commutation of her sentence in 2003. Pearson, who spent eight years in prison, now works full time supervising a mentoring program for women in the criminal justice system.

"If it hadn't been for FAMM, I might not be sitting here talking to you today," said Pearson, now 54.

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