a bird and a bottle

Not so shockingly, the US government has sold out American military women yet again. There’s news today (via Majikthise) that Congressional Dems have withdrawn legislation that would have required U.S. military bases to stock emergency contraception. Here’s a snippet:

For reasons that remain unclear, Michaud [the sponsoring Congressman] withdrew the legislation the next morning. According to [his press secretary], it was purely a logistical snafu: “Key supporters had to be in their districts.” But sources close to the issue tell a different story: The legislation, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, with bipartisan support, was dropped by a Democratic leadership unwilling to go to bat for pro-choice issues. Despite Michaud’s confidence that the votes were there, Democratic leadership wasn’t so sure, and they didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out. The legislation might not have sunk, but they jumped ship anyway.

Newsflash for all of you women in fatigues: if you are sexually assaulted by a fellow officer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have access to EC. How’s that for supporting our people in uniform?

The fabulous Ms. Lindsay Beyerstein has taken a new job as a reporter for In These Times. Her first piece, up today, takes on the Democrats and their recent support for abstinence only funding. What do the Dems have to give up, she wonders, in order to secure the success of some of their other priorities? Here’s a snippet:

Even opponents of abstinence-only education might concede that a few extra million for abstinence education is a small price to pay for easing the passage of a very important domestic spending bill that contains a lot of spending that’s important to Democrats.

Yet, principle is at stake here. Few people realize that the CBAE program promulgates out-and-out quackery and barely disguised religious dogma. These programs don’t just encourage students to remain abstinent as teenagers. By law, they are required to teach “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity,” among many other stipulations. In other words, the program must teach that all sexual activity outside of marriage, even between consenting adults, violates some nebulous “expected standard.”

Go check out the whole thing here.

Interesting news from ACSBlog: The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear a case challenging the disparity between sentences for crack cocaine and those for powder cocaine. As I have discussed — at length – the fact that crack possession is punished 100 times more harshly than cocaine possession is both nonsensical and racist (which might make it sensical to some, I guess).

Anyway, the Supreme Court will hear the case, Kimbrough v. U.S., in its next term after a nice long summer vacation. Kimbrough concerns a question of judges’ sentencing authority: does a judge have the power to sentence outside the 100-to-1 guidelines? SCOTUSBlog has a more full (and somewhat technical) explanation.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one comes out. It’s not just going to be a decision about drug war policies. Scalia has been surprisingly pro-defendant on sentencing, and Breyer supports giving judges more leeway. We could end up with a strange group in the majority and perhaps finally an end to one of the most overtly racist practices in today’s criminal justice system.

Some days, I think that the jury system should go the way of the dodo. As in, go away. Go extinct. Die out. As it has in the UK and other parts of the world. Juries - if they are fair and reasoned - could be a good thing and a check to the power of a single judge. But as they operate today they are often neither fair nor reasoned.

Today, for example, there were two articles in the NY Times about how far the jury system has strayed from its ideal as a deliberative body that metes out real justice — not racially biased (or otherwise biased) “justice.” In the first article, the times reported on today’s Supreme Court decision that makes it much easier for prosecutors to strike any juror who is not gung ho in favor of capital punishment from a death penalty jury. The Supreme Court, in (yet another) 5-4 decision penned by swing vote Justice Kennedy, overturned notorious conservative judge Alex Kozinski’s opinion at the appellate court level. This Court is not a moderate one. Not on abortion rights. And not, it turns out, on issues of criminal justice and the basic fairness that is necessary to lend credibility to the American criminal justice system.

The second Times article — a column by Adam Liptak — points to a fatal flaw in today’s jury sytem. A flaw that today’s Supreme Court decision will only exacerbate. In his column, Liptak, who is himself a trained lawyer, discusses the practice of peremptory strikes. During the process of jury selection, the prosecutor and defense attorney each have a set number of peremptory strikes; that is, they can cut a certain number of potential jurors for no cause and without the acquiescence of the adversary. Legitimate reasons to do this might include the belief that a juror will not be fair to the state or to the defendant. The most obvious illegitimate reason to use a peremptory strike is racism. but that’s of course, exactly when peremptory strikes are often used and when they do the most to undermine the fairness of the trial process. Liptak provides a case in point:

Allen Snyder, a black man, is on death row in Louisiana. An all-white jury in Jefferson Parish, in the New Orleans suburbs, sentenced him to death in 1996 for the fatal stabbing of a man his wife was seeing.

It took some work to get an all-white jury in a parish that is almost one-quarter black, but the prosecutors were up to the task. They used peremptory strikes — ones not requiring a reason — to remove all five eligible potential jurors who were black. (Four more blacks were removed for cause, all at the request of the prosecution.)

The purge had a purpose, according to a dissenting justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, who called for a new trial.

“The prosecutor’s intention to utilize racial bias became crystal clear when he commented during closing argument in the penalty phase that O. J. Simpson ‘got away with it’ in the California verdict that had been rendered shortly before this trial,” the justice, Harry T. Lemmon, wrote.

Peremptory challenges are at odds with the goal of driving racial bias (and other biases) as far away as possible from the criminal justice system. Yet their use in racist ways continue. Liptak has more:

According to a 2003 report of the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, which studied 390 felony jury trials in the parish from 1994 to 2002, the district attorney’s office used peremptory strikes to remove eligible black jurors three times as often as white ones.

In the two decades since Batson [the Supreme Court case supposedly ending exclusion of jurors based on race], there have been 20 murder trials in Jefferson Parish that ended in death sentences. Information about the race of the jurors is available in 18 of them.

Because the parish is 23 percent black, according to the 2000 census, you might expect to see about 3 black jurors on each 12-member panel. But of the 18 juries, 10 had no black members. Seven had one. One had two. None had three.

So today’s news and analysis provided a one-two punch that might prove to be a K.O. Now prosecutors have much more leeway to strike jurors they don’t like without using their peremptories. And not only that, but they can continue to use their peremptory strikes in a racist fashion with impunity. And the mass incarceration of black men and women marches on.

Over the last few years there has been a drumbeat of paternalistic rhetoric in American politics, particularly in the realm of women’s health and reproductive justice. In South Dakota, which last year passed an abortion ban that made exception only if the woman’s life was in danger, those who supported the ban touted it as necessary to protect women from the emotional and medical perils that supposedly would befall them if they had an abortion. The line was such bunk that anti-abortion wingnuts (er, activists) “>had to recruit fake doctors to make an ad in support of it. (The South Dakota law was subsequently rejected by popular ballot.) The siegelin South Dakota (pdf). But for perhaps the first time, it gained adherents. And it seemed to work.

Then, of course, there was the Supreme Court’s truly horrendous decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which exalted the paternalistic, daddy state knows best language about abortion rights and echoed the rhetoric used to support the South Dakota ban. As Linda Greenhouse noted in the NY Times, the language of the decision was groundbreaking:

But never until Wednesday had the court held that an abortion procedure could be prohibited because the procedure itself, not the pregnancy, threatened a woman’s health — mental health, in this case, and moral health as well. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that a pregnant woman who chooses abortion falls away from true womanhood.

And then there’s news today, via Broadsheet, that a pharmacy in Montana refused to dispense the birth control pill to a local woman because they were trying to “protect” her health. Nevermind that the woman was 49, unable to conceive, and using the pill for medical purposes (I really don’t think that should matter, but it’s worth mentioning). According to Broadsheet:

When the woman called the pharmacy to inquire why the pills were being discontinued, the owners claimed that the pills are dangerous for women.

This from the same pharmacy that ran a Mother’s Day ad that included this language:

On this Mother’s Day 2007, we wish to express our gratitude to all mothers for their unselfishness in our behalf. As health-care professionals, we call upon the American people to once again reaffirm the right to life for future generations of the unborn and join with us in our efforts to restore respect, dignity and value to each human life — born or unborn.

Apparently, this pharmacy, under new ownership, has decided across the board to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions. Daddy state (or daddy pharmacist) apparently knows what’s best for his women clients. And now he’s got a Supreme Court decision to back him up. And, in keeping with the paternalistic, anti-woman slant underlying the decision of both the Court and the pharmacist, such decisions are ok. Because, dammit, if a woman is going to open her legs for sex, she better be willing to open them for labor.

The NYC prison reform community has been up in arms for the last month or so over proposed changes to the city’s minimum standards for its jails. In April, the New York Board of Correction, supposedly the watchdog over prison conditions in the city and the manager of all of the city’s jail facilities, suggested changes to the requirements it sets for city jails. In addition to allowing the city to eavesdrop on telephone conversations between incarcerated men and women and their friends and families and to censor their mail, the new standards would allow for:

# More crowding: Open dormitory housing units would hold up to 20% more prisoners.
# More round-the-clock cell lock-in: Virtual solitary confinement-cell lock-in all day except for an hour for exercise and a shower-would be applied to prisoners who are removed from general population for their own protection or for administrative reasons. Prolonged cell confinement of this sort has been linked to prisoner suicides.
# Less assistance for Spanish-speaking prisoners: The amendments would repeal the requirement that the jails have sufficient Spanish-speaking staff to assist Hispanic prisoners, and would provide only that the Department of Correction must implement Aprocedures@ to ensure that they can understand communications from staff. There is no requirement or even hint as to what those procedures might be.
# Denial of personal clothing: The amendments would allow jail officials to require pre-trial detainees, in addition to sentenced prisoners, to wear uniforms, despite their having been convicted of nothing, and would deprive their families of the ability to provide them with clothing to protect them from the extremes of temperature often found in the jails. They would have to wear uniforms at all court appearances except actual trials, stigmatizing them before the court.

There are so many problems with these standards that it’s hard to know where to begin. New York Civil Liberties Union Director Donna Lieberman is on the right track:

“For the Board of Corrections to proceed down this path would do a fundamental disservice to prisoners and their families and would make all New Yorkers both less safe and less free,” said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU Executive Director.

Why would these standards do a disservice? First, they would continue the degradation and humiliation of incarcerated women and men and perpetuate some of the problems that lead to recidivism. Second, it will violate the privacy rights of both incarcerated people and their families. Third, as Legal Aid noted in a recent press release, the new proposed standards allow the Board of Correction to deflect the proposed improvements to carcereal policy, including ending disability discrimination, providing G.E.D. education for incarcerees, and renewing a court order protecting incarcerated men and women from abusive searches.

The human rights of incarcerated men and women are not just an issue for those of us concerned with prison reform. It’s a women’s issue too. As Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors notes (quoting a report of the Correctional Association’s Women in Prison Project):

*As of January 2007, 2,859 women were incarcerated in New York’s prisons – 4.5% of the state’s total prison population of 63,215. An additional 26,600 were parole (about 3,100) and probation (roughly 23,500).
* From 1973 to 2007, the number of women in New York’s prisons increased by 645%.
* Almost 69% of the state’s female inmates are women of color: about 47% are African American, roughly 22% are Latina, and 30% are Caucasian.
* New York’s general public is 30% women of color and almost 69% Caucasian.
* 84% of women sent to New York State prison in 2006 were convicted of non-violent offenses.
* As of January 2007, 33% of New York’s female inmates were incarcerated for a drug offense. Almost 80% of women drug offenders were women of color.

The fact that we are expending energy fighting against proposed bad changes instead of in support of proposed positive steps is both frustrating and alarming. I keep wondering when we will realize that the U.S. is not the beacon of righteousness in the area of human rights that we claim to be. Certainly there have been wake up calls in recent years (hello Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) and yet the U.S. still holds itself out to the world as a model. A little melodramatic? Maybe. But these days I’m not so sure rationality gets us anywhere.

If you want to do something, head over to petition online and sign the petition against the proposed changes.

The UVVA. Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Laci & Conner’s Law. Sounds nice enough, right? We want to be able to punish people who commit violence against pregnant women, because we are concerned both about the heightened risks of violence against pregnant women and about doing as much as we can to ensure a healthy birth outcome.

If only it were that simple…UVVA’s, as many of you probably know, were imagined and implemented with a much more political and much more suspect purpose — to establish fetal personhood and support anti repro justice crusaders.

Want more evidence? Well, around the country, prosecutors have attempted to rely on UVVA’s to prosecute pregnant women for not ensuring a perfect birth outcome.

Last week, RH Reality Check’s Amie Newman took on the issue, in the context of Kansas’s new UVVA, which was signed into law by the state’s “pro-choice” governor, Kathleen Sebelius. And what’s funny about Kansas, and what makes the UVVA’s political purposes so blindingly clear, is that the state already had a law protecting pregnant women. Newman has more:

In fact, in Kansas, this law repeals statutes already on the books that criminalize injury inflicted upon a pregnant woman. Twelve years ago, Kansas enacted “Motherhood Protection” laws (K.S.A. 21-3440 and K.S.A. 21-3441) that, according to the reproductive justice advocacy organization ProKanDo, “recognize the particularly heinous nature of crimes against pregnant women by providing separate criminal charges for those who interrupt a pregnancy in the commission of a crime.” These laws were put into place over a decade ago as the result of anti-choice advocates who, at the time, desperately wanted a UVVA in Kansas. What they got instead were laws that heightened the consequences of intentionally harming pregnant women, recognizing the atrocious nature of this type of crime, without defining fetuses as full people.

Fast forward to 2007 when anti-choice advocates in Kansas were finally able to pass the full UVVA that mirrored their ideology while serving their political purposes. Kansas’ law, according to Julie Burkhardt, executive director of ProKanDo, “contains extreme language when talking about life beginning at fertilization or conception — similar to about fifteen other states’ UVV laws.” So what reason can there be for repealing legislation already in place that ensures that perpetrators of violence against pregnant women will be prosecuted uniquely for their crimes? And why did the law pass now — with a pro-choice Governor and five failed attempts in previous years? There may be many reasons; though none have anything to do with justice, protection or concern for the victims of violent crimes.

Some evidence that the UVVA is neither meant to really address violence against women nor effective at preventing such violence: as Newman notes, in none of the 30 states that have state UVVA laws has violence against pregnant women declined. Not only do the laws not help women, but they put women’s reproductive lives in to jeopardy:

Perhaps what is most disturbing about the steady stream of laws like these around the country is their insidiousness. Julie [Burkhardt, director of ProKanDo, a pro-choice political action committee in Kansas] says, “With this type of bill, anti-choice advocates are hitting the spectrum of women’s reproduction.” While many reproductive justice advocates have wondered for years how anti-choice activists could scream so loudly for the punishment of abortion providers while somehow absolving women who access the abortions, it is no longer a puzzle.

“There is a real disconnect — when people think of reproductive health we think about abortion because that’s the hot button issue. It drives voters. But it’s also good for everybody to look at laws like Kansas’ law - it doesn’t just hurt women who need abortions but hurts women who want to continue their pregnancies and be mothers,” Julie says. Women who get abortions are women who chose to become or are already mothers at different points in their lives. Laws like these punish women across the entire reproductive continuum.

So what next? When supposedly pro-choice governors are signing UVVAs into effect, can we really have hope that we can stop their passage? Well, I don’t know. And I’m not particularly optomistic, particularly since these laws appear to protect both women and fetuses, at least on their face. What will it take to get the message across about the perils of the UVVA? How many women will have to end up in jail and how many others will have to end up injured or worse?

Two unpleasant news items today: first, via Feministing, I learn that pregnancy discrimination is up. Then I head over to the NY Times and bump head-on into an article about the antis’ increasing reliance on the argument that abortion should be banned because it is bad for women.

And then it struck me: these two news developments are inextricably related.

Here’s what I mean: pregnancy discrimination is up because there is little government mandate not to discriminate against pregnant women. Sure, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act says that where Title VII applies (larger employers, usually), employers cannot discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, but that leaves a whole lot that’s not covered (smaller employers, cases where it’s not discrimination but requests for extra benefits related to pregnancy). The slight nod of acceptance regarding pregnancy discrimination — it’s still not considered unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy even if it is against federal law — links directly into the thinking underlying the Times article: women are not rational actors when their fertility is concerned, and pregnancy is the prime example of that.

In the case of the anti-abortion rhetoric, the thinking goes that women who are pregnant and who are considering abortions cannot fully understand the consequences of their actions for their own mental health or for their families (when the Supreme Court accepted this argument in its recent Gonzales v. Carhart decision, I threw up a little in my mouth). If the Supreme Court’s decision is any indication, that way of thinking, in all its condescending and backwards glory, seems to be gaining adherents. And it’s fed into by the pervasive notion in American culture that pregnant women are somehow less human…less intelligent, less able to make decisions. Why, if that’s the case, then it all but makes sense to discriminate against them at work!

See what I mean about those dots being connected?

Sorry for the extended absence, kids. Between the beginning of work and my partner’s return from his year in Germany, it’s been a busy few days…

…but the bizarre news just keeps on comin’. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday (via TalkLeft) that Berkeley, that bastion of progressiveness, is struggling under the weight of its homeless problem. The city’s proposed solution? Ban smoking on city streets and then just arrest the homeless for smoking. Because they’re the most likely smokers, of course, and throwing them in jail will get them off the streets. The Chron has more:

As Mayor Tom Bates sees it, the alcoholics, meth addicts and the like who make up a good portion of the homeless population on Shattuck Avenue downtown and Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus “almost always smoke.” And because smoking bans are the hot ticket these days for California cities, why not meld the two as part of a “comprehensive package” for dealing with the street problem that Bates says “has gone over the top”?

In this case, vagrants could be cited for taking a drag on the town’s main drags.

The program will be paid for by raising parking fees by fifty cents per hour around the city.

There are so many things wrong with this program that it’s hard to know where to begin. First, at least in NY, there are lots of people, homeless and homed, who smoke on city streets. Is the ordinance only going to be enforced against the homeless (which would be illegal selective prosecution)? And since when is the best way to reach out to the homeless to punish the behaviors that may have contributed to their predicament in the first place? While the mayor may be correct that many of the Berkeley homeless are meth users or are addicted to alcohol, fining or incarcerating them based on those addictions (and the addiction to nicotine) neither helps solve the level of homelessness nor addresses the cause of homelessness. If the mayor — and the progressive people of Berkeley — are really concerned about decreasing homelessness around their city, maybe they should consider providing support systems for homeless people, including drug treatment, mental health services, and — gasp! — help securing shelter. Laws like the Berkeley law make it even more difficult for the homeless to get off the streets: by ensuring criminal records and preventing access to social services, the city makes it harder for people to obtain and keep jobs.

At least there is one voice of reason in Berkeley. Kriss Worthington, a city Councilman who proposed a law in 2001 that would have prevented cops for ticketing people for sleeping on sidewalks (the law failed of course), recognized that the proposed law would accomplish little:

“My interest is in making things better for the homeless and business,” Worthington said. “And none of these things — a bunch of new laws — look like they will do.

You know what I think is bad or business? Having restaurants tell people they can’t step outside to smoke because they might be mistaken for a homeless person and arrested. Sheesh.

(also at Feministe).

It’s ridiculous that this law was (and is) considered “controversial.”

Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell today signed a bill that will require all licensed health care facilities to provide emergency contraception (EC) to victims of rape and other sexual assaults. The law, which will go into effect on October 1st of this year, mandates that healthcare providers offer accurate and objective information about EC and that they provide the drug upon request to any woman who has been assaulted.

Sounds good, right? Women who have been raped or sexually assaulted should not have to carry the child of their attacker against their will. Seems like common sense. Or simple human decency. Especially in a state where up to 40% of sexual assault victims report that they were not offered the drug.

But of course it’s not that simple. The Ms. Feminist Wire explains why:

Out of the state’s 31 hospitals, only the four Catholic hospitals objected to the bill. In order to appease concerns by Catholics who oppose distribution of contraception, the bill allows a third-party provider, such as a rape crisis nurse, to dispense the medicine. Catholic officials, however, are not satisfied with the provision; Archbishop Henry J. Mansell still objects to the distribution of EC on hospital grounds, the Hartford Courant reports.

The reason the church objects? Because, though the law requires a totally superfluous pregnancy test (since EC will not affect an already existing pregnancy), it does not mandate an ovulation test, which Catholic hospitals in the state currently require before dispensing EC.

I really can’t believe we’re still fighting about this. I can’t believe that the science has been twisted so far and that women are hated so much that we would deny rape victims a pill that could — if offered promptly — help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. But I should expect this at this point…it’s just another example of the ironically pro-abortion “pro-life” agenda. Culture of life my ass.

(Also at Feministe)

Yesterday the U.S. Sentencing Commission released its 2007 cocaine report 2007 (PDF). The report - the fourth of its kind in recent years - aims to address the disparity between sentences for crimes involving powder cocaine and those involving crack. The 100-to-1 difference has resulted in harsh sentences for low-level crack users — and has decimated low income communities and communities of color. Wealthier, whiter communities, where cocaine is more popular, have gone mostly untouched.

In its report yesterday, the sentencing commission stopped far short of actually addressing this sentencing disparity. It made only three recommendations (and buried them in 200 pages of analysis). The ACLU summed up the report’s proposals:

· Increase the amount of crack cocaine required to trigger the five-year mandatory minimum sentence, as current law subjects low-level drug offenders to the same or harsher sentences as major dealers.

· Repeal the mandatory minimum penalty for simple crack cocaine possession.

· Reject proposals to lower the amount of powder cocaine required to trigger the five- and ten-year mandatory minimums, as the Commission finds “no evidence to justify such an increase.”

Ok. I’m with them on the first two. Increasing the level of crack required to trigger a harsh five year minimum sentence is an important step to reducing the impact of the misguided “War on Drugs” on low level dealers and - worse — people who possess for their own use. Repealing the mandatory minimum for possession is clearly ancillary to that. But it’s that third recommendation that really stings, and that reduces the positive impact of the other two. In the third bullet point, the commission rejects the idea of getting rid of the 100-to-1 disparity by saying that there’s no need to bring the level of powder cocaine needed to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence down to be more in line with that of crack cocaine.

Now, in a vacuum I agree with that third recommendation. I don’t think we should be punishing cocaine use more harshly. We should be punishing crack and cocaine use less harshly. But U.S. drug policy does not exist in a vacuum. By refusing to address the disparity here, the commission condones its continuation.

In fairness, not nearly all of the blame can be placed at the feet of the sentencing commission. This is the fourth time in twenty years that the commission has urged Congress to act to change drug sentencing laws. But Congress has remained inactive. Unsurprisingly. There’s some hope though: Recently, a bipartisan coalition has been pushing the Drug Sentencing Reform Act, which would reduce – but not equalize — the disparity. And there is a general push toward more humane prison policy from some conservative senators.

But by ignoring the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity — or at the very least, refusing to recognize its impact in its recommendations — the sentencing commission has enabled Congress’s inaction and allowed a racist policy to continue.

(also at Feministe)

Actually, quite a lot.

N.Y. Governor Spitzer announced recently his proposal to greatly expand the use of DNA testing in the New York criminal justice system. Under the current system, DNA is collected from people convicted of only the most serious crimes — rape, murder, burglary. Spitzer’s proposal, which has been kicking around the state legislature for some time now, would require that DNA be collected from ALL people convicted of ANY crime, including misdemeanors. Get convicted of pot possession? The state’ll have your DNA. Get arrested and convicted for protesting against a political convention? Yep, your DNA gets sampled too. The plan would also require the collection of samples from everyone currently incarcerated, on probation, and on parole.

The upshot to Spitzer’s proposal, and what makes it different from the old proposals, is that criminal defendants would have access to the state DNA database too, and could use it to prove their innocence. It would also require that prosecutors notify the court if they find out that there might be DNA that would exonerate the accused.

The upshots sound pretty good. DNA evidence has been used to exonerate over 200 people who were wrongly convicted and who have spent up to 30 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. DNA can be as powerful a tool for defendants as it is for prosecutors. But NY’s plan - for all the talk of equanimity - goes too far.

First of all, prosecutors are already under a duty to report evidence that exonerates the accused. The NY plan just codifies that. Second, DNA is not like fingerprints, which can only be used for a specific purpose. DNA evidence, once collected, provides a wealth of information to the government. Information that may have nothing to do with whether or not the person from whom the DNA is collected committed a specific crime. I don’t know about you, but I am not too keen on turning people’s most sensitive information over to the government at a time when it’s clear that the government does not respect its citizens’ privacy. Third, DNA evidence is not foolproof — but juries often think it is. The New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposed a similar program proposed by NYC Mayor Bloomberg last year, reports on the perils of relying too heavily on DNA:

In the past five years the use of DNA by law enforcement has come under increasing scrutiny by critics who have documented cases in which the use of DNA has been subject to gross negligence and intentional abuse. The Houston Police Department closed its DNA lab in 2003 after it released from prison two men who had been falsely incriminated by faulty lab work. In 2004, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer report documented 23 errors that the Washington State Patrol laboratory had made in the investigations of serious crimes.

So what are we to do? We want to protect people from wrongful convictions while also ensuring that convicted rapists can be easily caught should they rape again. I’m not saying DNA should never be collected. But there’s a balance that can be struck. The governor’s proposal ignores the possibility of a more evenhanded approach and puts a heavy hand on the justice scale.

Last week, in a flurry of chest puffing and pounding, President Bush threatened to veto the hate crimes bill passed by the House and headed toward approval in the Senate. The bill, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, would expand the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation, gender, gender identity (i.e. trans men and women), or disability. Bush laughably claims that state law already protects the rights of these groups.

The trouble is, the L.A. Times, whose editorial page is usually spot on, seems to have taken the Bush bait. In an editorial yesterday, the paper lauded the bill as it applies to sexual orientation, but claimed that it’s unnecessary to protect people from gender or gender identity motivated violence:

The problem is that the House bill goes further, by including gender and disability in its definition of hate crimes. According to the FBI, fewer than 1% of hate crimes in 2005 reflected a bias against the disabled. Although the FBI doesn’t keep count of gender-bias crimes, California does, and only 1.3% of the state’s hate crimes in 2005 involved “anti-gender bias.”

Huh? I wonder how the FBI and the state of California got those statistics. Because it seems to me that they must have relied on a very narrow understanding of what violence is gender motivated. Take rape, for example. I would argue that rape can be a hate crime (usually against women). But I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t included in that 1.3%. For perspective, according to the FBI, hate crimes based on sexual orientation account for over 14% of the hate crimes nationwide.

And what about gender identity? According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, while 29 states have laws that protect people based on sexual orientation, only seven and D.C. protect people based on gender identity. Transgender people are estimated to be 7-10 times more likely to be murdered than the national average. Yet gender identity is only implicit in the new hate crimes bill; the bill’s sponsors in the House have indicated that they intend “gender” to cover gender identity, but it’s unclear whether the Senate will agree.

The LA Times is right to point to the importance — necessity, really — of a law that explicitly protects the rights and safety of gay women and men. But by minimizing the need for a similar spotlight on women and transgender men and women, the article plays a part in the continuing normalization of violence against them.

(also at Feministe).

(image: prison crowding in a California state prison)

Prisons around the U.S. are full to bursting these days. California has most notoriously battled the problem of the prison bulge. But the problem is not limited to CA. With more people incarcerated than ever before in the U.S. — almost 3 million, about 491 people per 100,000 — more and more states are likely to face prison crowding crises in the coming years.

Today comes word (via Sentencing Law & Policy Blog) that Nevada’s prison system is buckling under ever more crowded conditions. From the Nevada Appeal:

The inmates at Nevada’s Warm Springs Correctional were still adjusting to their cramped quarters and new cellmates when Gov. Jim Gibbons toured their cell block.

After walking down a hallway between 12-by-12-foot cells now holding four prisoners each, he urged state lawmakers to vote for bigger prisons.

“It doesn’t take much more than that to force the system into a meltdown,” Gibbons warned of the crowded conditions, and lobbied for lawmakers to pass his $300 million budget request for prison expansion.

The causes of the near-meltdown of Nevada’s prison system — as well as those in Connecticut, Texas, Kansas, and Nevada — are clear, while the benefits remain doubtful at best:

The federal government was offering extra grant money to states that used such “truth in sentencing” laws, and by 1996 most states had one.

Sentences for violent offenders around the country nearly doubled, hitting an average of 88 months, according to one U.S. Department of Justice study.

Ten years later, the costs of tougher sentences continue to mount, while the benefits have remained elusive. State legislatures have a case of “spending fatigue” when it comes to prisons, says Michael Thompson, director of the Justice Center at the nonpartisan Council of State Governments in New York.

“Why aren’t we doing any better in terms of recidivism rates?” Thompson asked. “We’re spending that much more money, and the same number of people are going back to prison. We should be getting better outcomes.”

So what can we do? Well, getting rid of mandatory minimums is a good first step. Reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine sentences, a process that has already begun but that could be stalled by Congress, is another important move. Of course, fixing this problem long term requires longer term policy changes. We’ve got to stop treating addiction like a crime. We’ve got to lower recidivism rates by providing real job training and education to people who are incarcerated and by providing support and job assistance when they are released.

Basically, we’ve got to make it politically unpopular to be a “law and order” candidate in any traditional sense of the phrase.

I’ve been writing angry a lot recently. So much doom and gloom. Particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart a few weeks ago.

But not today. Or at least, not this post. Because I’ve got a reproductive justice victory (!) to report on. And believe it or not that victory occurred in one of the reddest states.

Last Friday, I was able to take part in a conference call with reproductive rights advocates from Oklahoma. The advocates — doctors, lawyers, and even a sewing circle! — in April helped defeat SB 714 (PDF), a bill that would have prohibited the provision of abortions at state funded hospitals except for to save the life of the woman. After the bill passed in the state legislature, the governor, who has a mixed record on abortion rights, vetoed it. A veto override in the state senate failed.

The situation for reproductive rights in Oklahoma is pretty bleak: There are only 3 abortion providers, 96% of counties are without abortion services, planned parenthood does not provide abortions, and there is nowhere in the state to procure an abortion after 17 weeks. SB 714, had it become law, would have made it even more difficult for women to terminate their pregnancies in the state.

After listening in on the conference call (which was organized by the wonderful women at National Advocates for Pregnant Women), a few things were clear. First of all, the call made clear the importance of coalition building. The bill was defeated in large part because doctors spoke out against it. The governor — and most importantly, the senator who provided the decisive vote on the override — listened to the doctors. While it’s frustrating that the voices of women were not strong enough, it’s also vital to recognize how powerful the alliances between the medical community and the legal/political activist community can be. Also, I now know that sewing circles don’t necessarily involve sewing. As the circle’s leader Wanda Jo Stapleton put it, “We comfort the needy and needle the comfortable.”

Unfortunately, while the import of this victory is clear, the fight may not be over. The veto override failed, but only one by one vote. A Democrat state senator, Charlie Laster, originally voted for the bill but, after listening to the doctors’ advocacy, changed his mind and voted to uphold the veto.

The activists who took part in the conference call worry that the bill may yet reemerge, since a re-vote on the veto override can happen at any time until this legislative session ends one year from now (OK has two-year sessions). So they’re continuing to work together to fight for reproductive justice in OK. You can help shore up their efforts and build on their victories here.