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16 March 2008

"The Wire"'s writers have a plan to end racist Gulag America and the racist War on Drugs

Agence-Vleeptron Presse apologizes for its tardiness in filching and posting this remarkable document. We been megasuperbusy.

Later the A-VP Editorial Board will have a few original thoughts about this matter. But for now, let these dudes speak for themselves.

Particularly if you live in the USA and stand any chance of being called to serve on a criminal jury, please read every word. This is a very unusual and important set of ideas.

The Wire is a drama series on the HBO (Home Box Office -- itself part of the Time-Life corporate empire) subscription cable television channel. The drama is set in Baltimore, Maryland's inner-city slums.

~ ~ ~

Time Magazine (USA)
Wednesday 5 March 2008

The Wire's War on the Drug War

by Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon

The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9.

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

- 30 -


11 comments:

Vleeptron Dude said...

Hmmmm ... I always thought being a nullifying juror was the American epitome of "thinking for yourself."

As the War on Drugs has meteorically incarcerated its 2,300,000 children, women and men (women are this moment's most rapidly increasing segment), it has been accompanied by an accumulation of new federal and state rules of evidence and courtroom procedure which increasingly favor the prosecutors' ability to "blind" the jury and keep the jury from knowing all the facts and circumstances of the alleged crime. Instructions to juries by judges have also been severely restricted in ways that favor the prosecution.

So when both sides have finished presenting their cases and the judge has instructed the jury, the jury goes into its secret deliberations not really knowing what the evidence really is, or its context.

Then there's the increasingly common practice and pattern of "testilying" -- narcotics police lying under oath about defendants. The prosecutors know the cops are purjuring themselves, but systematically suborn and overlook the purjury.

All these things have built an anti-Constitutional machine which makes conviction an almost foregone conclusion. Indigent defendants are usually advised by their barely competent public defenders not even to take their case before a jury, but just quickly to plead guilty and beg the judge for mercy (which mandatory minimum laws prevent judges from considering).

Listen, pal, check your (secretly recorded) history tapes. Nixon started the Gulag drug ball rolling for one specific purpose: To throw blacks in prison without making it look too obvious that the whole thing was a racist political scam.

But now we've heard the tapes, and it sure is obvious to everybody but you that it's all about imprisoning blacks and disenfranchising their political power.

Now you have to write to this columnist for the mainstream Allentown PA Morning Call and scream at him:

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v08.n291.a03.html

He's advising his readers to jury nullify drug cases, too.

The whole point of a jury, and its secret deliberations, is citizens' constitutional right to decide a prosecution smells like 5-day-old sushi, and choose to acquit.

You seem to be very opposed to this final protection against the nearly limitless power of the state to send all the black people to prison for decades.

Cool. Well, at this moment, you're almost always getting everything your way. There's a new bus full of mostly non-white all-poor railroaded defendants on its way to felony prison as we speak.

Before I croak, I dream about living in the country that has the world's 2nd largest Gulag. When I get my next jury notice, I intend to help realize my dream in the privacy of the jury room.

P.S. Vleeptron has one rule: No anonymous driveby nasty comments. Try some guts sometime, leave a name and a link. Then rant.

P.P.S. "The Wire" writers are American citizens, just like Jane Fonda. That more than fully qualifies them to express any opinion on any topic they like.

Vleeptron Dude said...

You want to be thick, be thick. When I speak in C-space, I'm transparent and identified, I let everybody know who I am and about where I am.

You have fine reasons to cloak and disguise and fail to identify yourself. I respect those reasons -- though exactly why I respect them escapes me at the moment. (There is a US Supreme Court ruling from the 1970s which protects the right of citizens engaged in political speech to wear a paper bag over the heads and be anonymous if that's the style of political participation that most pleases them.)

Sure I'm angry. I didn't serve in the US Army to help create the World's Largest Prison System, with typically 10-12 higher likelihood of blacks going to prison than whites. I never signed on to this Racist World's No. 1 Gulag, I never checked off on The Land of the Free's Prison-Industrial Complex, which is making fortunes on Wall Street on the raw material of imprisoned human beings.

That's America NOW, but historically we've done Just Fine with only 100th this number behind bars, with a fraction of drug felonies on the books, and with far shorter typical sentences.

This is a human-rights catastrophe fully as bad and shameful as South Africa's Apartheid. I want it ended (and I sign my name when I say so). Using the tool of jury nullification to end it will be particularly sweet. Ordinary citizens saying: "This sucks, I've had enough of it."

So ... like ... are you east of the Rockies? west of the Rockies? Maybe you're giving us your opinions from Kafe Internet Sofia in Bulgaria. Did you ever serve in the US military? Ever smoked pot? Ever driven drunk? Maybe you're always anonymous because you're on some sex offender list.

That no-anonymous driveby comment thing really is a very old rule on Vleeptron. Later today I'll erase your nasty-ass life-hating racist unAmerican comments. I don't mind heated debate, but I'm not going to clog up the Comment Sewers with racist shit from cowards.

Vleeptron Dude said...

From the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, released a couple of weeks ago:

===========

Washington, DC - 02/28/2008 - For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison — a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.

According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women, according to the study.

During 2007, the prison population rose by more than 25,000 inmates. In addition to detailing state and regional prison growth rates, Pew’s report, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008, identifies how corrections spending compares to other state investments,

[in particular compare states' investment in education with its investment in public and higher education, that stat's a real screamer]

why it has increased, and what some states are doing to limit growth in both prison populations and costs while maintaining public safety.

Vleeptron Dude said...

CORRECTION FROM VLEEPTRON:

[in particular compare states' investment in prisons and incarceration with its investment in public and higher education, that stat's a real screamer]

Vleeptron Dude said...

Because we've known for decades that the usage rates of illegal drugs are the same for non-whites as for whites -- if anything stats indicate whites use illegal drugs more than blacks.

But in the same period, blacks go to prison typically by state at rates from 10 to 12 times more often and for longer sentences than whites. That's the machine we made. You like its results. Its results are the dramatically preferential incarceration of blacks.

In the first five, maybe 10 years of the post-Nixon War on Drugs, you could possibly be excused for not noticing that (in Nixon's words) "it's all about the blacks." There used to be, and sometimes still is, a phrase "unintended consequences" -- good laws, just an unintended but innocent consequence.

By 1975 and the Rockefeller Laws, only the blind (and the racists) couldn't see what the fundamental purpose of the machine was.

In Nazi Germany, they put all the Jews in concentration camps. All perfectly legally, under the rule of law. How long would you have said, "Well, it's the law, we have to obey the law, if all the Jews are going to prison, that's just an unintended consequence of the law"?

You like the World's Largest Prison System? You defend it? Face it, Anonymous Buddy, insulting as it may seem -- embrace this Gulag, you're a racist.

Vleeptron Dude said...

This is just ridiculous. You can't spell, you're marginally illiterate, but much more important, I don't have any idea who you are.

Once before, I read a letter-to-the-editor praising the war on drugs and its wonderful results. I googled the guy's name, and he was a state prosecutor -- the Drug War gave him his job for life, and his increasing political power and budget.

With your lousy education, who are you? A corrections officer? A cop?

Of course you want to keep filling up the prisons.

Call me back when you're willing to take the paper bag over your head.

Vleeptron Dude said...

No no, it has for several years been Vleeptron's policy to delete comments from anonymous driveby jerks who won't give any hint about who they are. I am guessing from your comments that you're a corrections officer, and need all the black people to go to prison in order to support your family and buy an above-ground swimming pool in time for summer.

I'll delete the above sometime today.

Who said I was a liberal? I hate liberals. I vote the straight Communist Party ticket every election.

Try revealing your identity sometime. Takes guts, I know, but try it, it might change your life.

Vleeptron Dude said...

Good, goodbye. You're really a dunce -- who won't reveal his name. Nice combo.

Anonymous said...

hey I wanted to leave a comment days ago, it was an interesting debate. And since I live in a country with liberal laws towards drug use i thought I might add a few things here. Too late, too bad. thinkforyourself was proven guilty of Drive-By commenting without leaving a proper identity. Maybe 3 Strikes n Out is his idea of Freedom, Justice and Fair Trial and Human Rights. But not mine and not yours. Drug abuse is not a crime, it is a disease that can be cured under certain circumstances. You can get the kids off the street by spending more money on Education than Defense and drug trafficking could be reduced by making certain substances legal to a certain amount. you dont need more money for border patrols, the coppers and jails, you need more money for libraries, comminity projects and social work. Bloody Hell, is it that difficult ?

America is the only country that I know of where a prison guard can make more money than a teacher. Now that should give thinkforyourself something to think about if he ever gets back

Hey, I dont leave my real name. I like to toy around with it from time to time. Thank FSM you know who I am (sort of)

Vleeptron Dude said...

I think I could find you. I will just drive to all the parts of Switzerland that are far away from the new Klee museum. Or set a trap for you by staging a Ramones concert.

Did you like that nasty barfight? I've been in a wretched mood, and that nincompoop was the last straw. Usually I let even the stupidest anonymous drivebys linger in the Comment Sewers deep beneath the streets of Ciudad Vleeptron, but this jerk just had to go. If he'd left a name or a nick with a link, he could keep his meanspirited ignorance immortalized until the End of Time for all I care.

But I think he's probably a prison guard. Which is okay, but he should have the cojones to say so. He needs more prisoners so he can get his family their above-ground swimming pool in time for summer.

I don't think he reads many books or even goes to the movies much. My Communist Party membership is an old joke from one of my fave movies, "The Russia House," a Tom Stoppard screenplay from the LeCarre novel. Barney the drunken English book publisher (Sean Connery) is being interrogated by the CIA. (No waterboarding, but they do give him a polygraph test.)

CIA INTERROGATOR: It seems that your parents were somewhat politically liberal.

BARNEY: Liberal? Me dad HATED liberals. He voted straight Communist Party ticket all the way.

===========

Anyway, the Anonymous Nincompoop fell for it and began denouncing me for believing in a Failed Economic/Political System.

(Who says it's failed? As Fidel is in his final days, aren't there three brand-new South American countries that just went Commie? The South is Red, Comrade!)

Anonymous said...

well that Klee Museum is only 30 km south of me. Yesyesyes I know, but do you know how difficult it is to turn a woman on to something YOU like so that she thinks she discovered it by herself without your help. Bloody difficult, that is, I have tried it

As for the Mones: they split ages ago, all forming mebers have passed on, the only way to see them would be Cafe Dreck on a Saturday night..maybe Hendrix would to a Midnight show on the same night, and glenn gould a morning matinee on sunday if we can persuade him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIf-k9vElhQ&feature=related