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Black Lives Matter: Australia

Protest in Australia; two signs are visible: one reads "lest we forget the frontier wars, black lives, white lies" and one shows a black and red image of Australia with the word "genocide" written on it

Our public discourse [is] full of blak [sic] bodies but curiously empty of people who put them there. Alison Whittaker

This weekend protestors for Black Lives Matter in Australia took to the streets in contravention of Covid-19 health warnings to join worldwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd to highlight police violence against people of color and to once again raise the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

The statistics and the stories of Black deaths in custody is a vexed issue in Australia, and a national disgrace. In the 30 years since a royal commission was conducted, successive governments have failed to implement many of its key recommendations; and in that time 432 Aboriginal Australians have died in police custody. Despite the manifest violence, negligence, and displays of overt racism around these deaths, charges against police are rarely brought, and there has never been a conviction for an Aboriginal death in custody in Australia. 

Indigenous activists and families of victims have been trying, with only incremental and limited success, to elevate the issue in the wider Australian public. Most of the names and stories of these people are not known to most Australians. 

In a piece for The Conversation, Alison Whittacker, law scholar, poet and Australian Indigenous activist, writes,

“Do you know about David Dungay Jr? He was a Dunghutti man, an uncle. He had a talent for poetry that made his family endlessly proud. He was held down by six corrections officers in a prone position until he died and twice injected with sedatives because he ate rice crackers in his cell. Dungay’s last words were also “I can’t breathe”. An officer replied ‘If you can talk, you can breathe.'”

The statistics for Aboriginal incarceration in Australia are mind-blowing. In some areas in the country, Aboriginal people are the most incarcerated people on earth; They make up roughly 3.3% of the overall population but account for 28% of the prison population. Aboriginal women represent 34% of the overall national female prison population.

The 460 deaths in custody since 1990 is a terrible number, and to each belongs a story – a life, and then a death of indignity, of violence, of neglect. As in the US, in Australia it belongs to an historical legacy of rapacious, brutal colonial expansion. 

May 27 to June 3 is Australia’s National Reconciliation Week. These dates mark two significant milestones for Aboriginal people. One is the 1967 referendum, which for the first time recognized Aboriginal Australians as citizens. The other is the High Court native title decision known as Mabo, which overturned the legal doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ – the principle by which the Crown acquired sovereignty of the continent in 1788, on the basis that the lands were lands ‘belonging to no one.’ 

But there is still a long way to go for Australians to come to terms with the history of frontier wars, which morphed into state maintained forms of oppression and violence, and then into official government policy of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. This history is not visible enough to, nor unflinchingly acknowledged by, wider Australia. Nor are the tendrils visible which reach through that history into the present, holding Aboriginal people in all sorts of disadvantage. Disadvantage that is reflected in the statistics. As the Uluru Statement from the Heart says:

“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.” 

What, at this time, now, can be said and done about the work of reconciliation? In 2000, 300,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for reconciliation. This year, then, marks the twentieth anniversary of ‘the bridge walk’. Yet material change has been frustratingly slow, and in some indicators, things are going backwards. 

The 2018 Close the Gap report on Indigenous health and education targets and outcomes found child mortality at twice the rate for Aboriginal children, school attendance rates declining, and a persistent life-expectancy gap of almost a decade between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. 

Perhaps reconciliation has had its moment. It was maybe only the first word Australians have learned in the lexicon of change and of justice. Recognition of the nation’s shameful history is a starting point on the long road to equality and justice. But perhaps it has become a platitude, a way for white Australians to settle the ledger of their guilt, a way to paper over deep-seated systemic injustice that is thwarting real progress for Aboriginal lives and that continues to create privilege for settler Australians.  

The problem, as many voices have been saying (for a long time but) especially in the weeks since the BLM protests broke out in the US following the murder of George Floyd, is that white and settler oppression of Black and Indigenous people is thoroughly baked in to the system; baked into the system of colonial expansion– which included slavery and dispossession under terra nullius (both mechanisms used to dehumanize people for the purpose of wealth creation) – and it is baked into its neoliberal iterations. 

Perhaps the problem, rather, is that we have been reconciled to these things, to the reality of Indigenous disadvantage and risk of police violence and incarceration, for too long. 

How, then, can we reimagine and re-engage the concept, the work of reconciliation, or do we need to move beyond it to another stage? The national conversation in Australia has been painfully slow to get going. 

National Sorry Day is marked on May 26th, began in 2007 when the Australian Government, following the release of the Bringing Them Home report, formally apologized to Aboriginal people who were forcibly removed as children from their parents in a government assimilation policy. 

Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita writes that the findings of the report “[were] a source of deep shame for many Australians, and for some a source of guilt” ( A Common Humanity, 1999, pg. 87). While, as Gaita observes, many people feel shame and guilt, many also resisted such feelings, and felt that they were being asked to take responsibility for past wrongs they felt no part of. 

The refusal of shame sometimes takes the form of national pride, in which being proud of one’s nation is mutually exclusive with acknowledging its brutal history and recognizing the remnants of that history. 

Those who hold this conception of national pride take the view that history in which racial injustice is afforded a more central place in our story and our journey to self-understanding is overly bleak. It is known by its detractors as the ‘black armband view of history’ and they argue that we should be focusing on trying to fix the current inequalities rather than looking backwards into a troubled past. This obviously ignores the fact that these current inequalities, created by that past, are able to continue because it has never been reckoned with. 

Therefore the corrupted, shallow conception of national pride can never do anything other than let the deep national wounds fester. To be authentic in our attempts to reconcile, we should not contrast our national truth telling with our national interest, and reconciliation cannot be about ‘moving on’ until the appalling statistical gaps between white and black Australia are well and truly closed. 

But the injustice is not just expressed in the material conditions (by these gaps), or even the systemic problems. Simply moving forward means that there is no proper acknowledgement that those who suffered —  and continue to suffer these injustices — are wronged, and that to be wronged, is itself a distinctive and irreducible form of harm. 

Jacqueline Rose, on the 2018 conference on ‘Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation’ in Stellenbosch, South Africa, wrote: “thinking was not enough. Not that ‘feeling’ will do it either, in a context where expressions of empathy – ‘I feel your pain’ – are so often a pretext for doing nothing.”

Guilt and shame are part of a pained acknowledgement of wrongs we have committed or in which we are in other ways implicated. But they must also be part of what forces us to change the system and ourselves. 

As protests in response to George Floyd’s murder and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racialized violence and oppression raged across the US last week, a Sydney police officer was filmed handcuffing and then sweeping the legs out from under a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal boy who had just issued a vulgar verbal threat; the officer slammed the boy’s face into the pavement. 

Shortly afterwards the New South Wales police minister defended the officer, saying he was provoked and threatened. The minister, in public remarks, expressed far more outrage at the verbal abuse from the teenager than at the officer’s brutal response. 

How can reconciliation occur if such blatant power differentials cannot even be recognized, if the historical weight of wrongs done to a people and the humiliation and disadvantage they continue to suffer is totally invisible? Nothing, then, has been reckoned with. 

The worst thing about this story from Sydney is the grim, horrific moral equivalence being drawn between a lippy teenager and an officer of the law, whose duty is to ‘protect and serve’ using brutal and retributive force.  

When a teenager can be face-slammed for giving a mouthful of foul language to a police officer and this act can be defended by his superiors as a response to a threat, we are nowhere. 

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Solitary Confinement and COVID-19

photograph of empty prison cell

On March 28th, 2020, Patrick Jones became the first person incarcerated in federal prison to die of coronavirus. At the time of his death, Jones had served 12 years of his 27-year sentence for a non-violent drug charge. He was working hard on appeals, hoping to get out early to live a different kind of life with his children. The spread of coronavirus in prison made that dream an impossibility. Since Jones’s death, four other inmates died of COVID-19 at the institution in Louisiana at which he was being held.

In response to the deaths and to the continued spread of the virus in the facility, six immunocompromised incarcerated individuals at the prison have sued for early release, claiming that the response to the situation has been too slow and that their lives are in serious danger. They don’t want their sentences to turn out to be death sentences, as Jones’ did. Their suit was filed by the ACLU last week.

Concerns about the spread of coronavirus in detention facilities has motivated both state and federal detention facilities to release some prisoners, as I have written about here. Other approaches to dealing with the outbreak are more disturbing. The Federal Bureau of Prisons announced that, for the next two weeks, inmates will be confined to their cells for 14 days—a move that strongly resembles implementation of solitary confinement for the entire prison population. At the end of the 14-day period, the action will be reassessed and may be extended if necessary.

There is good evidence to support the conclusion that solitary confinement takes a significant mental toll on those who are subjected to it. Former Harvard psychologist Stuart Grassian conducted a study that indicated that roughly a third of people in solitary confinement were “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” In addition to those conditions, those held in solitary confinement experienced conditions such as “hallucinations; panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished impulse control; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; and difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory.”

Under ordinary conditions, solitary confinement is used by prison employees for a range of reasons. Inmates are sent to solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons. They also may end up there for their own protection when there is reason to believe that a threat exists to life or well-being. Many argue that there are no legitimate reasons to relegate a person to solitary confinement and that the practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. In keeping with this judgment, a handful of states have passed laws limiting or banning the practice.

Lack of access to consistent, quality mental health services exacerbates this problem. There is evidence to suggest that, at least when it comes to federal institutions, mental health issues frequently go unresolved. Given the known link between solitary confinement and mental illness, at a very minimum, funding and staff should be provided to adequately and humanely address the predictable mental illness this policy is likely to cause.

In response to these general concerns about solitary confinement, some argue that desperate times call for desperate measures. This situation lends itself to no ideal solutions. Confining incarcerated people to their cells is the lesser of two evils. It may be the case that solitary confinement leads to mental illness, but mental illness is better than dying of coronavirus. They argue that there is simply nothing else to do.

Others argue that the rapid spread of infectious disease is a predictable part of an incarcerated experience. When the offender chose to commit a crime, they knew that they might be caught and that the prison experience wouldn’t be pleasant. There is a reason why the possibility of prison is supposed to serve as a deterrent to crime. We have to punish people who commit crimes, or the law will become meaningless. Prison officials must do their best under difficult circumstances, and solitary confinement in these cases may be the best they can do given their obligation to keep those who have committed crimes incarcerated.

In response, one might challenge such a strenuous commitment to the idea that it is morally necessary to keep individuals who have committed crimes incarcerated come what may, even when doing so means they will live weeks in solitary confinement. The right approach might be to let many more inmates out of prison than we have so far (but only under the conditions that their situation isn’t more compromised outside of prison than it is inside). There may be no ready humane strategies for dealing with this pandemic, but with any luck this will cause our culture to radically rethink how we understand criminality and the proper role of punishment.

One significant challenge to bringing about real change is that individuals who have committed and/or have been convicted of crimes are politically marginalized. They have limited platforms for speech, and, in many cases, they can’t vote. Many people adopt a retributivist attitude toward criminal punishment, which results in a state of affairs in which no one is paying attention to the way incarcerated people are treated.

If, indeed, inmates must be held in solitary confinement for their own good, steps should be taken to ensure that this is done as humanely as possible. They should be treated with respect and regard, their desires to communicate with friends and family should be honored to the greatest extent possible, and their need for exercise and recreation should be accommodated.

Now that we’ve seen the problems that a pandemic of this magnitude can pose for detention facilities, we are morally obligated to see to it that we don’t return to business as usual after the it is over. What changes can we make to institutions to make it less likely that we’ll have to resort to solitary confinement in the future? What steps can we take to limit the number of incarcerated people in the United States? More theoretically, we should ask if all crimes should be viewed through the lens of retributivism. In some cases, a broad range of rehabilitative efforts might be more appropriate. An even more holistic approach would focus time and resources on the root social causes of crime so that we’re preventing it from occurring in the first place rather than punishing it in inhumane ways after it has taken place.

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Does the Fair Chance Act Live Up to Its Name?

close-up photograph of 'Help Wanted' sign in storefront window

With the US having one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, it is estimated that over 70 million Americans have some type of criminal record – that’s approximately one in three Americans. Regardless of how minor or major an individual’s offense is, having any kind of criminal record presents a series of obstacles to successfully reintegrating oneself back into society. The most pronounced of these is finding employment and housing – almost nine in ten employers perform background checks during the hiring process and four in five landlords do the same on prospective occupants. Research shows that employers are biased against citizens with criminal records even though they assert that this is not the case. While employers ostensibly indicate an inclination to hiring ex-convicts, evidence establishes that employer callback rates decrease by 50% for those with a criminal record. 

Crusading against such employment disparities are movements like Ban the Box, an American campaign that began in Hawaii in the late 1990s led by civil rights activists and advocates for ex-offenders, working towards removing the check box that inquires whether a job seeker has a criminal record. This campaign aims at allowing ex-convicts a better chance at employment by spotlighting their skills and qualifications in the recruitment process before being questioned about their criminal record, thereby preventing the stigma of an arrest record or a conviction ruling out their employment immediately. The basis of this campaign is that ex-convicts who struggle to find employment upon being released from prison are more likely to reoffend, which is, of course, damaging to society. 

The campaign gained momentum after the 2007-2009 recession, with activists for the campaign stating that it is necessary to remove the check box because an increasing number of Americans have criminal records as a result of harsh sentencing laws, especially for drug-related offenses and citizens are struggling to find work due to the compounded effect of high unemployment rates for ex-felons and background checks becoming more common since the 9/11 terror attacks. Moreover, marginalized communities like communities of color, sexual minorities and people with mental illnesses are disproportionately affected, with black men being six times more likely to be imprisoned than a white man and LGB (lesbian, gay and bisexual) people being three times more likely to be incarcerated than the general population.

As of 2019, 35 states and more than 150 counties and cities have implemented Ban the Box, also known as fair chance act in their hiring policies, all of which prohibit employers from asking applicants about their criminal history on a preliminary job application. Some Ban the Box laws are more elaborate, compelling employers to refrain from asking about the applicants’ criminal history until a job offer has been made or an interview has been conducted. 

Even though Ban the Box laws seem to be beneficial on the surface, some industry groups such as the National Retail Federation have openly criticized these policies for possibly exposing companies, employees, and customers to crime. The New Jersey Chamber of Commerce also condemned Ban the Box for putting employers at risk of being slapped with lawsuits from rejected applicants. Fair Chance laws put businesses in a vulnerable state, leaving them open to facing lawsuits for rejecting an ex-convict, while also having to deal with the possibility of facing negligent hiring lawsuits if an ex-convict employee reoffends at work. Moreover, businesses have found fault with Fair Chance laws for wasting the time and resources of both employers and applicants. Ban the Box laws could cause ex-convicts to waste their time applying for jobs that they will probably not get, when they could have spent their time working on applications and interviews for jobs that are known to recruit ex-offenders. Additionally, these laws would also be wasting employers’ time because if an ex-con is rejected towards the end of a hiring process after their criminal record is made known, applicants who didn’t have a criminal record but were turned away could have already found another job or could now be interested in other employment opportunities. 

Corporate concerns aside, recent research shows that Ban the Box laws have cultivated an unforeseen impediment to the very objective of the campaign. Researchers have suggested that implementing Fair Chance policies may ultimately be disadvantageous to society as a whole by decreasing chances of employment for low-skilled racial minorities. If prevented from looking into an applicant’s criminal history, employers could recourse to stereotypical assumptions based on the individual’s race or gender to extrapolate on whether or not an individual has a criminal record, which would exacerbate gender and racial disparities in the application pool. 

Ban the Box does better ex-offenders’ chances of finding employment, but on the flip side, minorities seeking employment have to bear the brunt of enhanced racial discrimination both in spite of, and because of, the Fair Chance Act. Activism like Ban the Box can and should be used to make positive social changes and challenge the status quo but at the same time, in light of recent research, must be re-evaluated.

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Angola Prison and the Ethics of Prison Labor

Photograph of the entrance to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, showing a stop sign and a guard station along with a sign naming the institution and the warden Burl Cain

Walking through Louisiana State Penitentiary, one might feel as though they have traveled back to the early 19th century. Instead of wasting their days away in a cell, inmates (most of whom are black) line massive farm fields harvesting wheat, corn, soybeans, milo, and cotton. Prison guards (most of whom are white) patrol the fields on horseback, prepared to subdue an unruly inmate, or worse, an organized strike. Most hauntingly, there’s a good chance that many of the prisoners working this field are descended from the slaves who worked it when it was a private plantation in the 19th century. It was during this period of private ownership that the land got its nickname, “Angola,” after the African nation where many of its slaves hailed from. Centuries later, Angola Prison is now the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, and rigorously employs inmate labor.

Conditions of prison labor at Angola are known to be particularly brutal. Once called the “Alcatraz of the South” and the “Bloodiest Prison in America,” there have been multiple alleged cases of prisoner maltreatment and torture. In the 1930s, 31 prisoners slit their Achilles tendons to protest brutal working conditions. More recently, however, allegations of slavery in court have been inmates’ primary method of resistance. Social justice organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union have attacked indications of slave labor such as inmates working for as little as two cents an hour, and punishments for not working being as severe as solitary confinement. Additionally, organizations have challenged Angola Prison on allegations of inmates being denied healthcare and being forced to live in unsanitary conditions.

However, despite its seeming brutality, prison labor at Angola may be doing more to benefit inmates than to harm them. This is thanks to rehabilitative reforms made to prison operations by former warden Burl Cain. Upon taking over the prison, Cain stated that his number one priority was “moral rehabilitation” of inmates in order to reduce in-prison violence. He did this by two means: religion and labor. Religion is obvious at Angola, with Christian churches scattering the prison grounds, and services being held daily. Holding more people who are serving life sentences than Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas combined, Cain’s objective by imposing religion is to give inmates at Angola hope for their futures and motivation to behave properly. As for labor, Cain holds a similar objective. At Angola, work is intended to give inmates a day-to-day purpose by fostering skills and achievement. The type of work administered is not limited solely to the fields, however. Inmates are also encouraged to do work at the prison learning trades such as automotive technology, culinary arts, and plumbing. Those serving life sentences learn and teach these skills to inmates who have the possibility of parole, thus sustaining what is one of Louisiana’s largest vocational institutions. While using religion and labor as means to achieving “moral rehabilitation” may be controversial, the results speak for themselves: the number of assaults in the prison has decreased from 1,346 in 1992 to just 343 in 2014.

Yet, despite the potential benefits provided to inmates at Angola, serious ethical pitfalls still exist. The most obvious of these pitfalls is the fact that inmates have no choice whether they work or not. This is where the argument over prison labor slips into slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment reads, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” While explicitly lawful, America’s history of harsh incarceration practices, such as mandatory minimums and severe sentencing for drug offenses, would point to prison labor being an unethical practice. Louisiana laws are especially tough on crime. For example, the mandatory minimum sentence for second degree murder in Louisiana is life without parole, and a Louisiana citizen can be sentenced up to 10 years for writing a worthless check. Harsh sentencing laws such as these in combination with other factors contribute to Louisiana having the highest state incarceration rate in the U.S., and therefore the highest incarceration rate in the world. Because incarceration is sometimes unfair, particularly in Louisiana, enforcing labor while incarcerated could be considered slavery.

Additionally, the fact cannot be ignored that statistically, there are innocent men living and working in Angola. There have been as many as 850 exonerations in the U.S. since the late 1980s, and it is estimated that approximately one percent of America’s incarcerated population is innocent. Applied to Angola Prison, which holds about 5,000 prisoners as of 2010, this means that as many as 50 men working Angola’s fields did not commit the offenses for which they are serving time. Furthermore, the practice of prison labor falls under even more scrutiny when it is used for capital gain. In the U.S., it has become an increasingly popular practice for prisoners to be outsourced to factories and call centers of private businesses for the businesses’ profit. These “private prisons” accounted for approximately 18% of federal prisoners in 2015, and corporations as large as Victoria’s Secret and Starbucks are guilty of employing inmate labor to work for well below minimum wage. While Louisiana has continued to expand the legal rights of private prisons in the state, Angola appears to be the exception to this. Angola is almost entirely self-sustaining, with prisoners processing and consuming the goods they produce.

While Angola’s version of inmate labor may seem inhumane on the surface, there are some very real benefits to prisoners who take advantage of some of the programs it has to offer. That being said, Angola still cannot escape many of the moral shortcomings that are carried with inmate labor. Inmate labor is a slippery slope into slavery, and slavery is the last thing the U.S. should be tampering with given its place in the nation’s history. However, there is also the challenge of making the lives of prisoners serving life sentences meaningful again, and Angola at least appears to be taking steps to address that challenge. Regardless, the practice of inmate labor is riddled with ethical complexities, many of which can be solved at the source by re-evaluating the reasons a person should be incarcerated.

 

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In Michigan, A Prisoner Forced to Pay for His Own Incarceration

An image of a prison window

In the state of Michigan, Curtis Dawkins, prisoner and recent book author, could be forced to pay his dues of incarceration from the money received from his literary work.

Dawkins has been incarcerated for almost 12 years for murdering a man and has been writing a collection of short stories to pass the time. Before Dawkins was incarcerated, he was a writer earning his Master of Fine Arts degree. Most of the short stories in Dawkins’ The Graybar Hotel tell the life story of a prisoner, narrated in first person. The Graybar Hotel caught the attention of one of the top literary publishers in the United States, and offered Dawkins $150,000 to publish the collection of short stories.

But the offer has raised some serious questions. Some wonder if it is acceptable to support a person who was once involved in such an evil crime. Should inmates be allowed to receive money from stories about their prison life, which is a place intended for punishment?

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California Debates Parole for a Member of the Manson Family

On the night of August 9, 1969, several young people crept into the Los Angeles home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.  At the behest of cult leader Charles Manson, they stabbed the couple to death. Cult member Leslie Van Houten stabbed Rosemary LaBianca fourteen times. The group wrote messages on the wall in the victims’ blood. After she played her part in the murder, Van Houten took a shower, put on one of Rosemary LaBianca’s dresses, and ate some food from the refrigerator.

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Does America Believe in Rehabilitation for the Incarcerated?

A low-angle photo of barbed wire at a prison.

Michelle Jones wasn’t the only applicant to be rejected from Harvard University this year. However, hers is in many ways a special case. While she was initially accepted by the history department of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, her acceptance was ultimately overturned by Harvard’s administration. This move was in connection to the most interesting part of her case: Ms. Jones was only released in August of this year from the Indiana Women’s Prison after serving 20 years of a 50-year sentence for homicide. Although the legal system considered her sentence to be served in full, Harvard University—an elite academic institution—considered her past conviction as grounds for rejection. What does this say about the notion of reform and rehabilitation in the United States?

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Taking Stock of Solitary Confinement’s Mental Toll

In prisons throughout the United States, a total of somewhere around 80,000 prisoners are isolated from human contact for 22 to 24 hours a day. These prisoners are kept in very small cells—spaces of roughly 80 square feet.  In the cell is a bed, a toilet, and very little else.  Prisoners in solitary are fed three meals a day and are often allowed outside every day for an hour, with no contact with other prisoners.  The practice, commonly known as “solitary confinement” has come to be known by a number of euphemisms, including “restrictive housing” and “segregation.”

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Evaluating Solitary Confinement: A Matter of Values

Untidiness, tattooing, insolence towards a staff member, “reckless eyeballing,” and possession of an excessive quantity of postage stamps. These are all behaviors that are officially punishable by “restriction to quarters” and “change of housing” in the US Federal Prison System, according to Quartz. Thus, you can be placed in solitary confinement for relatively innocuous infractions, and the clear potential for abuse of this practice is one reason why the use of solitary confinement to punish prisoners has recently come under intense pressure. New York reached a legal settlement in 2015 with the New York Civil Liberties Union regarding the aggressive use of solitary confinement in its prisons, and a multi-year process was begun to lessen the times people spent in solitary confinement and to improve conditions in solitary confinement units.

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Homeless in Utah, Desperately Seeking a Backyard

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For more than 60 years, the sprawling Utah State Prison sat nestled at the base of the Wasatch Mountain range in Draper, Utah.  The prison was home to such notorious inmates as serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Gilmore, and serial pedophile and cult leader Warren Jeffs.  Utah was the first state to reinstitute the death penalty after the Supreme Court’s moratorium ended in 1973, and the state has since executed 51 people.  In 2015, the Utah legislature made the decision to relocate the prison to West Salt Lake City.  In its place, Draper Mayor Troy Walker proposed to house something that, as it turns out, struck Draper citizens as far more distasteful than even the prison—a shelter for the homeless.

The proposal was part of a plan to disperse the burgeoning 1,100-resident caseload of the The Road Home, a homeless shelter located in Salt Lake City.  Walker’s specific proposal was for Draper to take on the responsibility of a subsection of that population—a group of women actively looking for work, and their dependent children.  Explaining his decision to throw Draper’s name into the ring for the site of the new shelter, Walker said, “It’s the right thing to do; it’s the Christian thing to do. It’s the thing that will set us apart and make us the kind of people we are.”

Dutiful to his constituency, Walker held a town hall meeting on the topic at a local middle school.  Nearly 1,000 people attended.  Some of them packed the halls outside of the auditorium to avoid fire code violations.  Video of the meeting that ensued quickly went viral on the Internet.  Attendees of the meeting were overwhelmingly opposed to the relocation of the homeless shelter in their town.  At one, point, a homeless man stood up to testify to his experience with how homeless shelters benefit their charges.  He was booed into silence.

Many watching the situation closely are concerned by the gentrification that they are seeing.  The Salt Lake bedroom community of Draper is becoming more and more upscale. Property on the base of the mountain is prime real estate.   The new site of the prison is near the Salt Lake International Airport and Rose Park, one of the least affluent communities in the area.  Already home to a number of halfway houses, rehab centers, and a parole violator center, Rose Park can expect a new prison instead of the remodeled fairgrounds that they were promised.  The refusal of the homeless shelter seems to be motivated by similar considerations. The “not in my backyard!” mentality seems to entail either a desire for institutions like prisons and homeless shelters to not exist at all, or for their location to be in other, poorer, backyards.

Many moral theories emphasize the value of universalizability.  The idea is that, if you want to ensure that your decision is a moral one, it has to be a decision that you wouldn’t mind if someone else made under circumstances that were sufficiently similar.  If we want to bar homeless shelters from our own communities, we must be comfortable with everyone else barring homeless shelters from their communities as well.  Of course, we can’t do that unless we simply want homeless shelters to no longer exist.  After all, every community is someone’s community.  

Of course, the concerns of the citizens of Draper are not entirely baseless.  Homeless shelters are not good for property values.  Though we don’t want to confuse correlation with causation, it is true that property values are 12.7 percent lower in areas with homeless shelters than they are in other areas (all other things being equal).  Homeowners have obligations to provide for themselves and their families.  Their ability to do this may be compromised if they lose equity in their homes.

Homeowners also have a legitimate interest in their own safety, and the safety of their families.  Mental illness is common among the homeless population, and so is drug and alcohol abuse.  Residents of the area may have justifiable concerns that their communities will be less stable if the homeless population is introduced.

It is worth pointing out, however, that less affluent families living in lower-income communities have the same safety and stability fears as the Draper residents.  If the concerns of the Draper residents are justified, and if those concerns are sufficient for the Mayor of Draper to withdraw his offer of the prison as a location for the needs of the state’s homeless, why aren’t the identical concerns of those living in less affluent communities deserving of equal consideration?

Let’s not forget the plight of the homeless population.  Many moral philosophers have suggested that the best measure of the morality of a society is the way the least advantaged members of that society are treated.  Booing a homeless person into silence at a town hall meeting doesn’t say anything good about the society in which that kind of thing happens.

There is a silver lining to this cloud, however.  Though this particular situation suggests that there is room for some serious character development on the part of many Utah citizens, Utah has been making international news in a more positive way for a different approach to homelessness.  Implementing a novel new approach called “Housing First,” Utah has reduced homelessness by 72 percent over nine years.  The idea behind this approach is to do what the name suggests—provide housing to homeless people right away, without making that housing contingent on mental health or sobriety.  When dealt with in this way, 88 percent of the homeless population remains in the housing a year later, at a cost to the state less than it incurred when the homeless people were on the street.

The success of the Housing First program suggests a need to change our collective mindset toward the homeless, and perhaps about access to crucial human goods and services as well.  It makes sense, not just from a legal perspective, but also from a moral perspective, to attend to the basic needs of all human beings, especially those that are much less fortunate than the rest of us.

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Presidential Clemencies and the Role of Punishment

On November 22nd, President Obama reduced the prison sentences of 79 drug offenders. This is the latest in a burst of clemencies he has awarded during his last year in office. Traditionally, there is a burst of clemencies towards the end of a president’s term, when there are fewer political hurdles and relationships to maintain, but this week’s sentence reductions bring Obama past the 1,000 clemency mark – more than the past 11 presidents put together.

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Do Prison Education Programs Count as Forced Labor?

It is now common knowledge that education, whether prior or during a prison inmate’s sentence, is one of the most impactful factors in reducing recidivism, a revolving door phenomenon that sees two-thirds of prisoners return to prison. This phenomenon exacerbates the state of the largest prison population in the world, and locks away more than one in six of America’s Black men.

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Reconciling Democracy and Incarceration

The United States tends to exhibit a great nationalistic pride in its democracy. And so generally, we assume that any U.S. citizen over the age of 18 is eligible to vote. Yet this right can be taken away permanently if one is convicted of a felony, the most common of which being drug-related. Ironically, the United States, proudly deemed the “Land of the Free,” has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet it still may be shocking to consider that “[a]pproximately 2.5 percent of the total U.S. voting age population—1 of every 40 adults—is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.”

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Student Loan Debt’s Enforcement Problem

The prospect of student loan debt is often enough to scare any college graduate. For many, such fear is all too common; according to the Wall Street Journal, 71% of the Class of 2015 graduated with student loan debt. For many of these graduates, the amount owed is scary enough, in itself. What happens, then, when heavily-armed members of law enforcement are thrown into the mix?

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