African Americans Are No Longer Going To Jail... As Much!

Fewer Blacks Are Being Incarcerated. What's Up?

By Kelly Virella

The federal government reported in early-December that the number of imprisoned black people in the U.S. has declined by about 18,400 since 2000. That reduces the total number of black people in prison to about 591,900 as of December 2008.

Granted, across the U.S. black males are still imprisoned at a rate 6.5 times higher than white males and about 3 times higher than Latinos. Black women are incarcerated at a rate 3 times higher than white women and twice as high as Latinos.

But the reduction in the black prison population means 61,000 fewer black people were in state or federal prisons than expected by the end of 2008 (based on 2000 levels).

Most of the reduction appears to come from decreases in drug-related incarceration of African-Americans. In April, the D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported a 22 percent decline in the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses, from about 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005.

Meanwhile, the judiciary busied itself warehousing more white and Latino people. From 2000 to 2008, the prison population for white people increased by 57,200 to a total of 528,200. During the same time period, the Latino prison population increased by 96,200 to a total of 313,100.

Behind Bars, Black LA Activist Najee Ali Still Advocating For The Voiceless... Himself Included!

Early Release Candidate No. 1

By Annette Stark

It didn’t take long for Najee Ali to start advocating again — even behind bars. This time it’s for the early release of California’s nonviolent prisoners, specifically himself.

“The conditions are horrible and unsanitary,” says the hated-and-loved L.A. human-rights activist, speaking from Avenal State Prison, where he’s serving four years for witness tampering.

On a typical day, “I exercise, study and tutor inmates — many can’t read — and just try to keep a positive attitude.

“The worst thing I’ve seen?” he says. “Someone was stabbed last week and died in the hospital. He was targeted for being a child molester. Rapists and child molesters are pariahs here. I’m not advocating for the early release of hardcore gang members, rapists or child molesters.”

A year ago, Ali pled guilty to witness tampering involving a 2007 road-rage incident in which six motorcylists surrounded a car driven by Ali’s daughter, Jasmine Eskew, on a freeway. Eskew was accused by county prosecutors of crashing her car into one of the motorcycles — but the D.A. lost that case in court. At the pretrial hearing, Ali says he approached the bikers merely to “beg for mercy for my daughter” — a claim he sticks by today. But the bikers accused him of trying to bribe them, and county prosecutors again believed their version.

Ali, a former Crip who turned his life around, was on parole with two suspended sentences for a 1992 robbery, and a 2004 felony hit-and-run involving perjury. According to court records, prosecutors intended to charge him with attempting to dissuade a witness — a potential third strike that could have put him away for years. Instead, he pled to a lesser charge of “tampering,” and got four years.

Ali is at Avenal in the Central Valley, and with good behavior he is likely to be out within the year. But “based on the governor’s criteria” for cutting state spending by releasing prisoners, Ali now figures he would qualify for early release as of next month.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed letting nonviolent inmates serve their final year under “house arrest” with GPS monitoring. A federal court ordered California to cut its prison population by almost 44,000 over two years, using the savings to provide remaining prisoners with better health care. A few days later, 1,300 prisoners at the jam-packed California Institution for Men in Chino rioted.

Schwarzenegger last week described it as bedlam, with prisoners trying “to find anything they could to just hit each other, or stab each other with broken glass ... and entire housing units were burned.”

Ali says things are bleak at the Avenal: “We have eight toilets for 250 people, and the toilets back up. ... I think God put me here so I could see these Third World conditions. The only reason I haven’t gotten sick is that I can afford to buy my own food.”

He buys tuna, $1 per can.

In recent years, the extrovert Ali became an omnipresent voice, continually slamming the powerful. He was arrested for protesting what he saw as a racist Mexican stamp, he slammed Chief William Bratton as having failed to acknowledge organized hits on black children by Mexican Mafia, he called out Jesse Jackson for ignoring his illegitimate daughter, he got a restraining order against Congresswoman Maxine Waters for blocking him from entering a church.



He also advocated against the early release of heiress Paris Hilton by L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca, who complained that his jail was crowded. “I do regret that now,” Ali says. “I’m not afraid to say I made a mistake.”

Even more ironic, the man who openly courted controversy left for prison without a word to the media. That lull is over. “At the end of the day,” he says, “my accusers were all ex-felons, and one was a convicted child molester.” The attorney for his daughter, Anthony Willoughby, says: “I impeached all her accusers on the stand with their criminal records. The one guy who didn’t testify had a conviction of lewd acts on a child under 14.”

Now doing time for an incident that lacked independent eyewitnesses, Ali says today, “If I had been convicted of drugs or robbery, my credibility as a leader would be over. But I get letters from across the nation from people who are outraged at my situation.”

He says he’s received messages through outside contacts from state Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jermaine Jackson (“a very emotional moment for me”).

Before his incarceration, he was everywhere, holding press conferences, brokering gang truces, calling singer R. Kelly a “pedophile.” He doesn’t feel at particular risk from race-based gangs in prison, he says, because, “Gang members in the black, white and Latino population knew my gang work . ... In the Long Beach case, I supported three white young women who were victimized by a mob of black youths. There’s my support for the Latino woman who was set to die on the floor of the King Drew Emergency Room. ... I think even the Mexican Mafia respects me for standing up for justice.”

The story continues...

His Prayers Unanswered, Wesley Snipes Gets 3 Years In Prison

The Black superstar who has been working at his craft for over 30 years was just ordered to serve three years on lockdown for the multiple misdemeanor tax charges he was found guilty of by a jury of his peers.

It's unfortunate anytime someone has to be locked up, and this is clearly no exception.

CNN announced the decision by U.S. District Judge William Hodges in Ocala, Florida. Clearly the maximum penalty was meant to demonstrate that refusal to pay income taxes will cause you to be on lockdown, with three hots and a cot.

Snipes was convicted of three misdemeanor charges for not filing his taxes, the maximum sentence allowed, in addition to a fine up to $5 million dollars. The father of three was surrounded by his defense team earlier today arguing that he should not have to go to prison.

Snipes, who has starred in movies such as "New Jack City", "Jungle Fever", "Blade," "Major League", "Murder at 1600" and HBO's "Disappearing Acts" had been charged with felony conspiracy counts for participating in a scheme that rejects the legal foundation of the tax system. However, a jury accepted his argument that he was innocently duped by errant tax advisers and acquitted him on the most serious charges.

"The fact that Snipes was acquitted on two felony charges and convicted 'only' on three misdemeanor counts has been portrayed in the mainstream media as a 'victory' for Snipes," the government document says.

"The troubling implication of such coverage for the millions of average citizens who are aware of this case is that the rich and famous Wesley Snipes has 'gotten away with it.' In the end, the criminal conduct of Snipes must not be seen in such a light."

Despite several character witness letters written tv judges and celebrity buddies like Woody Harrelson and Denzel Washington, the probation department indicated in their pre sentencing report that Snipes’ conduct could be construed as trying to obstruct the investigation. The report said that could be grounds to increase Snipes’ jail time.

"In the defendant Wesley Snipes, the court is presented with a wealthy, famous and inveterate tax scofflaw. If ever a tax offender was deserving of being held accountable to the maximum extent for his criminal wrongdoing, Snipes is that defendant," it says.

"For nearly a decade, Snipes has engaged in a campaign of criminal tax conduct combining brazen defiance with insidious concealment," the prosecutors say. "By these means, Snipes has escaped paying more than $15 million in income tax to the IRS and has pursued an intended fraudulent harm to the United States Treasury of more than $41 million."

The document says Snipes shipped millions of dollars to accounts in Switzerland, Antigua and the Isle of Man to avoid taxes.

The IRS is also seeking repayment of all taxes and interest through civil court proceedings.

LET HIM OUT!!!! 26-Year-Old Secret Creates More Than Reasonable Doubt For Black Man On Lockdown!

Convicted Police Murderer Alton Logan Didn't Do It!

We post a number of stories here on 3BAAS about Black folks to keep you informed. This one is designed to make you angry, piss you off, and move you to action:

The affidavit was sealed in an envelope and stored in a locked box in Chicago, tucked away with the lawyer's passport and will. Sometimes he stashed the box in his bedroom closet, other times under his bed.

It stayed there - year after year, decade after decade.

Then, about two years ago, Dale Coventry, the box's owner, got a call from his former colleague, W. Jamie Kunz. Both were once public defenders. They hadn't talked in a decade.

"We're both getting on in years," Kunz said. "We ought to do something with that affidavit to make sure it's not wasted in case we both leave this good Earth."

Coventry assured him it was in a safe place. He found it in the fireproof metal box, but didn't read it. He didn't need to. He was reminded of the case every time he heard that a wronged prisoner had been freed.

In January, Kunz called again. This time, he had news: A man both lawyers had represented long ago in the murder of two police officers, Andrew Wilson, had died in prison.

Kunz asked Coventry to get the affidavit. "It's in a sealed envelope," Coventry said. "Open it," Kunz said, impatiently.

And so, Coventry began reading aloud the five-line declaration the lawyers had written more than a quarter-century before:

An innocent man is behind bars. His name was Alton Logan. He did not kill a security guard in a McDonald's restaurant in January 1982. "In fact "another person was responsible."

They knew, because Andrew Wilson told them: He did it.

But that was the catch.

Lawyer-client privilege is not complete; most states allow attorneys to reveal confidences to prevent a death, serious bodily harm or criminal fraud. But this case didn't offer that kind of exception.

So when Andrew Wilson told his lawyers that he, and not Alton Logan, had killed the guard, they felt powerless - aware of information that could free a man they believed to be innocent, but unable to do anything with that knowledge. And for decades, they said nothing.

As they recall, Wilson - who was facing charges in the February 1982 murders of police officers William Fahey and Richard O'Brien - was even a bit gleeful about the McDonald's shooting. To Kunz, he seemed like a child who had been caught doing something naughty.

"I was surprised at how unabashed he was in telling us," he says. "There was no sense of unease or embarrassment. ... He smiled and kind of giggled. He hugged himself, and said, 'Yeah, it was me.'"

Alton Logan already had been charged with the McDonald's shooting that left one guard dead and another injured. Another man, Edgar Hope, also was arrested, and assigned a public defender, Marc Miller.

Miller says he was stunned when his client announced he didn't know Alton Logan and had never seen him before their arrests. According to Miller, Hope was persistent: "You need to tell his attorney he represents an innocent man."

Hope went a step further, Miller says: He told him Andrew Wilson was his right-hand man - "the guy who guards my back" - and urged the lawyer to confirm that with his street friends. He did.

Miller says he eventually did tell Logan's lawyer his client was innocent, but offered no details.

First, though, he approached Kunz, his fellow public defender and former partner.

"You think your life's difficult now?" Miller recalls telling Kunz. "My understanding is that your client Andrew Wilson is the shooter in the McDonald's murder."

Coventry and Kunz brought Wilson to the jail law library and this, they say, was when they confronted him and he made his unapologetic confession. They didn't press for details. "None of us had any doubt," Coventry says.

And, he adds, it wasn't just Wilson's word. Firearms tests, according to court records, linked a shotgun shell found at McDonald's with a weapon that police found at the beauty parlor where Andrew Wilson lived. The slain police officers' guns also were discovered there.

Now the lawyers had two big worries: Another killing might be tied to their client, and "an innocent man had been charged with his murder and was very likely ... to get the death penalty," Kunz says.

But bound by legal ethics, they kept quiet.

Instead, they wrote down what they'd been told. If the situation ever arose where they could help Logan, there would be a record - no one could say they had just made it up. They say they didn't name Wilson, fearing someone would hear about the document and subpoena it. They didn't even make a copy.

But on March 17, 1982, Kunz, Coventry and Miller signed the notarized affidavit: "I have obtained information through privileged sources that a man named Alton Logan ... who was charged with the fatal shooting of Lloyd Wickliffe ... is in fact not responsible for that shooting ... "

Knowing the affidavit had to be secret, Wilson's lawyers looked for ways to help Logan without hurting their client. They consulted with legal scholars, ethics commissions, the bar association.

Kunz says he mentioned the case dozens of times over the years to lawyers, never divulging names but explaining that he knew a guy serving a life sentence for a crime committed by one of his clients.

There's nothing you can do, he was told.

Coventry had another idea. He figured Wilson probably would be executed for the police killings, so he visited him in prison and posed a question: Can I reveal what you told me, the lawyer asked, after your death?

"I managed to say it without being obnoxious," Coventry says. "He wasn't stupid. He understood exactly what I was asking. He knew he was going to get the death penalty and he agreed."

Coventry says he asked Wilson the same question years later - and got the same answer.

But ultimately, Wilson was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

His death penalty was reversed after he claimed Chicago police had electrically shocked, beaten and burned him with a radiator to secure his confession. (Decades later, a special prosecutor's report concluded police had tortured dozens of suspects over two decades.)

Logan's case was working its way through the courts, too. During the first of two trials in which he was convicted, Coventry walked in to hear part of the death penalty phase. "It's pretty creepy watching people deciding if they're going to kill an innocent man," he says.

The lawyers had a plan if it came to that: They would appeal to the governor to stop the execution. But with a life sentence, they remained silent.

Still, there were whispers. When Logan changed lawyers before his second trial, Miller says the new lawyer approached him. He had heard that Miller knew something more.

Please, he asked, can you help?

Miller says he told him he could do nothing for him. But he says he repeated the words he had uttered to Logan's first lawyer, more than a decade earlier:

"You represent an innocent man."

---

In prison, Alton Logan heard the news: First, Andrew Wilson had died. Second, there was an affidavit in his case.

"I said finally, somebody has come (forward) and told the truth," Logan says. "I've been saying this for the past 26 years: It WASN'T me."

In January, the two lawyers, with a judge's permission, revealed their secret in court.

Two months later, Marc Miller testified about his client's declaration of Logan's innocence.

But an affidavit and sworn testimony do not guarantee freedom - or prove innocence.

And Alton Logan knows that. After spending almost half his 54 years as an inmate, this slight man with a fringe of gray beard, stooped shoulders and weary eyes seems resigned to the reality that his fate is beyond his control.

"I have to accept whatever comes down," he says, sitting in a visitor's room at the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.

He insists he's not angry with Edgar Hope - the man who first said he was innocent - or even Andrew Wilson. He says he once approached Wilson in prison and asked him to "come clean. Tell the truth." Wilson just smiled and kept walking.

Nor is Logan angry with the lawyers who kept the secret. But he wonders if there wasn't some way they could have done more.

"What I can't understand is you know the truth, you held the truth and you know the consequences of that not coming forward?" he says of the lawyers. "Is (a) job more important than an individual's life?"

The lawyers say it was about their client - Wilson - not about their jobs, and they maintain that the prosecutors and police are at fault.

Kunz says he knows some people might find his actions outrageous. His obligation, though, was to Andrew Wilson.

"If I had ratted him out ... then I could feel guilty, then I could not live with myself," he says. "I'm anguished and always have been over the sad injustice of Alton Logan's conviction. Should I do the right thing by Alton Logan and put my client's neck in the noose or not? It's clear where my responsibility lies and my responsibility lies with my client."

On April 18, Logan will be in court as his lawyer, Harold Winston, pushes for a new trial. Along with the affidavit, Winston has accumulated new evidence, including an eyewitness who says Logan wasn't at McDonald's and a letter from an inmate who claims Wilson signed a statement while in prison implicating himself in the murder - and clearing Logan.

But obstacles remain.

Logan can't depend on Edgar Hope. According to his attorney, Hope probably will exercise his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

And he'll have to deal with eyewitnesses. His lawyer says one person changed her story in the two trials, but a second, the security guard injured in the shooting, did not. (A third, who has since died, had acknowledged that Wilson and Logan looked alike.)

Logan prefers not to look too far ahead or think too far back. He refuses to dwell on missed opportunities - marriage, children, job. "You cannot live with the situation I'm in and say, 'What if?'"

He says if he is released, he'll move to Oregon to be with his brother. "After spending 26 years in this hellhole, I want to get as far away from here as I possibly can," he says.

Last month, the Chicago Sun-Times, in an editorial, urged the attorney general or governor to release Logan, noting his claims of innocence "ring achingly true." (The state has declined comment on the case.)

Logan keeps a copy of the 26-year-old affidavit in his cell. Every now and then, he reads the single paragraph, trying to divine what the lawyers were thinking and if this piece of paper will help unlock the prison doors.

He's not banking on it.

"I'm not sold on it," he says. "The only time I'll be sold is when they tell me I can go."

For now, though, Alton Logan waits. The heavy prison doors clank behind him as he walks down the corridor to his cell. He does not look back.

Story by SHARON COHEN [AP]

Former SLA Prison Inmate Sara Jane Olson Rearrested, Told She'll Have To Do Another Year On Lockdown!!!

Black Defense Atorney Shawn Chapman Holley
Has Her Work Cut Out For Her

California authorities have re-arrested Sara Jane Olson just as she was leaving to reclaim her life after 6 years in the pokey.

The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled on Monday from her stint in a California women's prison for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said at a news conference today that they had miscalculated the amount of time she should serve in a separate case in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento bank robbery in which another SLA member killed a customer.

As a result, Olson must now serve one additional year behind bars, per the Los Angeles Times.

Shawn Chapman Holley, the attorney for Olson, who had changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, said her client called her Friday night and told her that prison officials had detained her at LAX Airport when she was about to board a plane for Minnesota and that she had then been taken to her mother's home in Palmdale.

Holley said that on Saturday morning, she called an official of the Corrections Department and was told that there might have been "a computation error" regarding the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve. Holley said Olson's husband and an official from the Corrections Department told her that her client was being taken to a prison in Frontera.

She said she was outraged by the action and asserted that her client had been illegally arrested and is now being "illegally imprisoned."

Holley said she had told Olson goodbye Friday at the home of a Southern California friend. "She met with her parole agent earlier in the day," Holley said. "He told her she was free to go to Minnesota and told her to tell her Minnesota parole agent to call her Los Angeles parole agent on Monday as a formality."

But about 11:15 Friday night, Holley said, she received a call from Olson, who told her that law enforcement officials at LAX "were telling her her travel pass was rescinded and they would escort her back to her mother's home in Palmdale." After midnight, Holley said, she got another call from Olson, telling her that she had been taken to her mother's home in a law enforcement convoy and that although she was not under arrest, law enforcement officials had stationed a car in front of the house and told her she would be followed if she left.

(Meet The Attorney Behind The Olsen Case)

Holley scoffed at the suggestion that there had been "a computation error." "We received an order from the state parole board more than a month ago informing us that she would be released on March 17," Holley said. "The idea that suddenly they discovered an error is untrue," Holley said. "What appears to be the truth is they are bowing to pressure from the Police Protective League or someone else.

Police Protective League President Tim Sands issued a statement today after learning that Olson had been prohibited from leaving the state: "Justice is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann Soliah can simply wander back to Minnesota after having only a token sentence for murder and attempted murder. Her prison sentence is not completed until her time on parole has been served. She was a flight risk 30 years ago and she is a flight risk now."

"We have researched the law, and she is officially on parole," Holley said. "The only way someone on parole can be taken into custody is if they have violated parole and it has been determined at a hearing that they have violated parole. There is no allegation that she violated parole." [CNN]

African American Murder Inmate Willie Green Rejoices After Release From 25 Year Jail Sentence, Still Maintains He Didn't Kill Anyone!

GOOD FRIDAY INDEED!

Willie Earl Green spent a quarter-century in prison for murder. Before him were streets he could stroll freely for the first time since he was young. Behind him were the last of the lockups that had caged him since 1983, for a murder he insists he did not commit.

"It's like I'm in a dream," said Green, 56, moments after he stepped into the sunlight outside the downtown Criminal Courts Building, where a judge ordered him released Thursday. The witness whose testimony had sent Green away for 33 years to life recanted, and prosecutors decided not to retry him.

Now, after a quarter-century behind bars, there were all these wonders for Green to behold: cellphones, remote car locks, a hug from his wife that would not be cut short by a prison guard. He sobbed as they embraced at the Kyoto Grand Hotel, around the corner from the courthouse, his first stop on the way to their Chowchilla, Calif., home. "It's all right, baby," his wife, Mary, said. "Everything's all right. . . . It's time to start living."

Her husband said he half-expected a guard to tap him on the shoulder, the routine at San Quentin State Prison. "That's what I'm waiting for," he said, "for them to come and tell me now, 'One hug, one kiss, you're over.' "

There was another person to hug Thursday -- Susan Breyer, the forewoman of the jury that found him guilty. "I'm thrilled," said Breyer, who had come to believe in Green's innocence. "I, they, took 24 years of his life."

And Green remarked on all the hugs he could have given -- to his father before he died in 1999, and to Mary before she underwent surgery for breast cancer last year. "I never asked for mercy," Green said. "I only asked for justice. . . . They can't hurt me no more. I'm free."

It was a day of firsts for Green. He drank his first cup of Starbucks coffee. He took it with cream and sugar -- two treats forbidden in state prison. His wife told Green that she would teach him to use her newfangled coffee maker and washing machine when they got home.

The soft-spoken Mississippi native was convicted of fatally shooting a woman at a South Los Angeles crack house. The sole witness, Willie Finley, had placed him at the murder scene, but Green and his lawyers said Finley had lied.

Four years ago, Finley told the lawyers that he had been high on crack the night of the killing and had not gotten a good look at the shooter. He said detectives helped him identify Green.

Last week, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Stephen A. Marcus cited Finley's new version of events in overturning Green's conviction. The ruling stopped short of declaring Green factually innocent, but Marcus found that jurors could have exonerated him if they had known the full story.

"Only the person up there, you and perhaps Mr. Finley know exactly what happened that night," the judge told Green at a hearing Thursday morning. "Don't let me read about you in the newspaper. As you go about your life, enjoy it."

About 4:15 p.m., deputies escorted Green from his holding cell, and he stepped haltingly onto the sidewalk outside the courthouse, where TV news cameras awaited him. He was dressed in a white linen suit his wife had brought, a stark change from the prison denims with "PRISONER" stenciled down each leg.

"I was wrongly accused," Green said. "I'm out now, I'm not bitter. I'm happy today."

He marveled at his surroundings. At San Quentin, he was allowed out in the yard just three hours during a typical day, his view mostly of the towering walls. "I feel like Cinderella," he said, gazing at the sky. He pointed at City Hall. "I like that building."

Then he asked a reporter to let him hold a cellphone, a contraption he had never touched before. He fingered the keypad a bit and carefully relinquished the phone. "Take it back before I drop it," he said.

He climbed into a rented Chevrolet, buckling up for the short ride to the hotel. "I don't want to break no laws today," he said.

At the hotel, an investigator for Green's legal team demonstrated a remote device to unlock the car. Green watched with delight as the investigator showed him how to open the doors and pop the trunk.

"That is something," Green said. "Teach me that someday."

A few minutes later, his arms were wrapped around Mary, who was introduced to him through a friend in 1991, six years after his conviction. Their relationship began with letters; they were married within a year. Until Thursday, they had never been together outside a prison, jail or courthouse.

They celebrated in a small hotel banquet room, with Willie Green wolfing down turkey and cheese sandwiches and mounds of fresh strawberries. He said the San Quentin dinner usually was so bad that he ate only the dessert, filling his belly with Top Ramen bought from the prison store.

Mary Green said she would serve him lobsters Sunday at home, where he would also take his first dip in a whirlpool bath. He shared a shower with two dozen men at San Quentin.

"I want to get that jailhouse smell off me," he said. He declared his cup of Starbucks far superior to the Big House coffee, known as "John Wayne," after the way the actor drank it in the movies.

Green had not been a model citizen before his imprisonment. He admits to using drugs and committing petty crimes.

On Thursday, he said prison had set him straight. He worked in the San Quentin library, earned his associate of arts degree and helped run a life-skills program -- parenting, anger management -- for inmates. He also never stopped proclaiming his innocence year after year, until the cell door finally opened.

"The system that put me in here was the same system that got me out," he said. "It's not perfect, but it's the best system in the world." [LA Times]

Women have No Men and No Money as Prison Spending Spirals Out of Control

States Spend More on Prisons than Education. Three Strikes Laws have over crowded the Nations Correctional System. These are the results of a new report by The Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project. In the end we find that getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers.

And ladies where is your man? For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine." And for us ladies the news is even worse as...



One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group.

Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were in jail or prison at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults. Whether per capita or in raw numbers, it's more than any other nation.

One SolutionThe report cited Kansas and Texas as states that have acted decisively to slow the growth of their inmate population. They are making greater use of community supervision for low-risk offenders and employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for offenders who commit technical violations of parole and probation rules.

Take a look at some of the other solutions to this problem and the rest of this story by DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer

SO YOU WANNA BE A THUG? CHECK THIS OUT:

Caught Up: An Interview with a Beginning Three Striker

Please click here to play the 11 minute interview with a 26 year old three striker. Be sure and share this with young men and women who are living life as if this hell hole was not at the end of their senseless actions. It's real.

Isidra Person-Lynn - My World Podcast

Courtesy of Susette Fisher's Making of a Thug.blogspot.com

U.S. SETS RECORD IN THE IMPRISONMENT OF BLACKS

According to a recent report released by the Justice Department, the number of incarcerated Americans reached an all-time record last year.
Local, state and federal officials jailed an additional 62,000 people as of June 2006 sending the prison population to 2.24 million people.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics' (BJS) annual report says the 2.8 percent increase in incarcerations was the largest increase in six years.

Black men continue to be imprisoned at record pace.

Blacks and Hispanics are the primary people being jailed. Currently, Black men, who are roughly 6 and a-half percent of the nation's total population, represented 37 percent of those behind bars.

African American males have an incarceration arte of 4.8 percent compared to 1.9 percent for Hispanics and 0.7 percent for whites. Amazingly, 11 percent of all Black males between 25 and 34 are in prison.

The primary culprits are the so-called war on drugs and tougher (some critics argue extreme) sentencing laws. The U.S. has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation in the world.

Communist-led China, for example, has a population nearly four times larger than that of the U.S. but has fewer people in prison. Some critics, such as the Drug War Chronicle - from Drug War Chronicle, Issue #492, 6/29/07 - are now blaming a "prison-industrial complex" which benefits and profits from the growing incarcerations.

DR. DEATH RETURNS TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING

Free after eight years on lockdown, Jack Kevorkian found prison to be "one of the high points in life."

Dubbed "Dr. Death" for claims that he participated in at least 130 assisted suicides, Kevorkian, 79, challenged authorities to make his actions legal - burning orders against him and showing up at court in costume.

"You think I'm going to obey the law? You're crazy," the retired pathologist said in 1998 shortly before he was accused _ and then convicted of murder after injecting lethal drugs into Thomas Youk, 52, an Oakland County man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. Kevorkian had videotaped Youk's death and sent it to "60 Minutes."

Although conviction earned the good doctor a 10- to 25-year sentence for second degree murder, his sentence was reduced for good behavior.

While promising never to help in another assisted suicide, his views on the subject haven't changed. "I'll work to have it legalized. But I won't break any laws doing it," Kevorkian said.

The state has banned assisted suicide since 1998, the same year voters rejected a ballot proposal that would have made physician-assisted suicide legal for terminally ill patients. Oregon is the only state in the nation in which a terminally ill patient with six months or less to live can legally ask a doctor to prescribe a lethal amount of medication.

Kevorkian will be on parole for two years, and one of the conditions he must meet is that he can't help anyone else die. He is also prohibited from providing care for anyone who is older than 62 or is disabled. He can speak about assisted suicide, but can't show people how to make a machine like the one he invented to give lethal drugs to those who wanted to die.

SOURCE

OKAY SO NOW BLACK FOLKS ARE TERRORISTS, HUH?

Al-Qaida Wants You!!!

"Federal and local law enforcement should be aware that al-Qaida terrorists may not appear Arab," warns a recent Homeland Security intelligence report.

A recent speech released by Osama bin Laden's deputy confirms earlier fears that African-Americans are the No. 1 recruiting target for the next generation of attacks.

In the latest message, al-Qaida No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri makes frequent references to what he calls the "martyr" Malcolm X, and says "I want blacks in America to know that we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind."

"The price of freedom is death." Zawahiri, again citing Malcolm X, suggests that Black Muslims who do not rise up against America are no better than "house slaves."

Last year, in another videotaped speech, al-Qaida propaganda chief Gadahn invited blacks to convert to Islam and take revenge against a nation that enslaved their ancestors. Gadahn, a white convert from California, said -- which is true -- that America "shamelessly brought us lynch laws, Jim Crow, and a death row where only convicts of certain races are sent."

Blacks make up the largest share of Muslims in America, with many being new Islamic converts. Christian prison chaplains say Islam is so popular with inmates they are having a hard time competing with Muslim chaplains.

In fact, Black Muslim leaders often refer to such conversions as "reversions," claiming Black "reverts" are merely returning to the Islamic faith prominent among their African forebears who were forced into slavery.

I DON'T KNOW OF ANY BLACK MEN WHO ARE GOING TO BLOW THEMSELVES UP. MANY OF OUR BROTHERS CAN'T EVEN PAY CHILD SUPPORT!

Nevertheless, the FBI worries Blacks could be the next face of terror. Since 9/11, the agency has already disrupted several homegrown terror plots involving Black Muslim converts, including:

Black Muslim converts in Miami allegedly conspired to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.

A Chicago Black Muslim, Derrick Shareef, allegedly plotted to blow up a shopping mall.

A Black U.S. soldier, Hassan Abujihaad, allegedly fed terrorists classified information about U.S. battleship movements.

Black ex-con Muslims allegedly initiated a prison plan to attack military recruiting stations and synagogues in California.

SOURCE