Justice Issues

April 8, 2013

Since the “War on Drugs” was launched in the mid-1980s, accompanied by mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenders, the U.S. prison population has exploded from under 900,000 to 2.3 million prisoners. With correction budgets consumed by building new prisons and staffing them, rehabilitation programs were slashed. Prisons all over the nation turned – with disastrous results – to the use of solitary confinement as its primary means of control. More than 80,000 inmates are being subjected to long-term solitary confinement in the United States. Not one of them will leave prison undamaged by the experience.

                                                      by Shawn R. Griffith

I was 18 years old, sitting in a solitary confinement cell. My confinement was not a result of assaultive behavior, but instead a form of retaliation for refusing to jog. I was in one of the “Boot Camp” prisons so popular in the 1990s. This was a shock-jock program modeled after the Marines’ real boot camps, like the one at Camp Lejeune. Ostensibly, it was designed by corrections officials to make the initial incarceration of youthful offenders so brutal that it would change their ways and divert them from future crime and the institutional lifestyle.

Unfortunately, for political reasons, it was also calculated to advance only the least offensive youths for early release. The others, like me with an armed-burglary charge, were pawns to make the program appear as if it were functioning as it was intended. The most sadistic guards from the State of Florida were brought in, and they pushed the young men who they did not want to complete the program to the brink of death. When I finally refused to jog anymore, actually collapsing of heat stroke, I was taken to medical where they registered a fever of 102.5. I was given ice for my forehead and sent to the dreaded confinement for refusing orders.

Jan. 7, 2012

Trayvon Martin

If George Zimmerman had obeyed the police dispatcher’s directive to remain in his car and to wait for patrol officers to arrive to question the person in the “hoodie,” Trayvon Martin would not have been shot to death.

by Don Fulsom and Alisha Dingus

When George Zimmerman goes on trial in the sensational Trayvon Martin murder case so will the“Stand Your Ground” laws and racial profiling.

Twenty-eight-years-old at the time he shot and killed 17-year-old Martin, Zimmerman now wears a monitoring device on his ankle and hides in near-seclusion at a secret Florida location. Fearful for his life, Zimmerman dons bulletproof apparel for his rare forays into public places, according to his lawyer.

Free on $1 million bail, Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder in the February 26, 2012 shooting of Martin.  His trial is set for June 10, 2013.

The nighttime slaying took place in a middle-class, gated subdivision called “The Retreat at Twin Lakes” in the central Florida town of Sanford.  Martin, as he had several times previously, was there with his father visiting his father’s financee and her son. He had the free time to be there due to being suspended from his high school at the time. That evening Martin had gone out alone to buy some Skittles and ice tea and was returning from the store when his fatal encounter with Zimmerman took place.

Nov. 28, 2012

This essay is adapted from a presentation J. Patrick O’Connor gave at the Collier County, Florida, Main Library on October 16, 2012.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

The United States operates the largest criminal justice system in the world, incarcerating 2.3 million people in over 5,000 jails and prisons. Another five million Americans are on parole or some sort of conditional release program.  Since the so-called “War on Drugs” was launched during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s along with mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug possession and sales, our prison population has nearly tripled.  Over 50 percent of the people now incarcerated are in on drug offenses, thousands of them for marijuana possession.

Although the U.S. makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we now incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Russia is a distant second. The U.S. justice system now imprisons its citizens at a rate roughly five to 10 times higher than the countries of Western Europe. It isn’t because U.S. citizens are five to 10 times more inclined to commit crimes than Europeans, it’s because our state legislatures have enacted a host of mandatory minimum sentences enhancements that took sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges and juries and placed it in the hands of “get tough on crime” prosecutors.  Over the last 15 years, these “enhancements” have doubled the average prison sentence for a wide variety of offenses. In terms of incarcerating youth, the disparity is far more pronounced. The United States incarcerates 336 per 100,000 youths. Austria incarcerates 25, Germany 23, Italy 11 and Japan 0.1. The second highest incarceration for youth in the world is 69 out of 100,000 in South Africa.