June 23, 2014

Former Congressman Jackson in Line for Early Prison Release
By Frederick H. Lowe

Former Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Good behavior has cut former Congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr.'s time behind bars. Jackson is scheduled to be released from prison on Sept. 20, 2015, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons today told The NorthStar News & Analysis.

Jackson, who is serving his sentence in the federal prison camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., had been scheduled to be released on Dec. 31, 2015.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Jackson to 30 months in prison for misusing $750,000 in campaign funds. Judge Jackson and the former congressman are not related.

Former Congressman Jackson transferred to the federal prison camp from the federal prison in Butner, N.C., where he began his sentence last October.

The Bureau of Prisons cut Jackson's prison time because of good time he had already earned and the good time he will earn in the future.

Inmates can earn up to 54 days of good time for each year they are in prison, reducing their sentences, the spokesperson said. They can lose good time for fighting and other infractions that violate prison regulations.

When Jackson completes his prison sentence, his wife, Sandra Stevens Jackson, a former Chicago Alderman, will begin her time behind bars. Judge Jackson sentenced Sandra Jackson to 12 months in prison.

Judge Jackson allowed the Jacksons to served staggered sentences with the former Congressman serving his sentence first, followed by Sandra Jackson. The judge allowed the arrangement so one parent could be with their two young children. Sandra Jackson pled guilty in February to filing false federal income tax returns on $570,000 from 2006 through 2011.

Jackson is the son of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, which is based in Chicago.  His son represented Illinois 2nd Congressional District from 1995 to 2012.

June 23, 2014

Free Her Rally organizer, Andrea James, addresses the crowd at Saturday's rally on the National Mall. PHOTO: Glynn A. Hill/TriceEdneyWire.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com)—Gray clouds and occasional drizzle didn’t stop more than 200 people from gathering on the National Mall Saturday to protest and demand an end to the alarming incarceration rate of women - disparately African-American.

Some came from as far as New Haven, Conn. for the rally, which featured speakers, singers, and a spoken word performance aimed at continuing to raise awareness of criminal justice disparities.

“Our focus is on the women and bringing them home,” said Andrea James, executive director of Families for Justice as Healing, a Boston, Mass.-based criminal justice reform group. She was also the organizer of the Free Her Rally. “It’s important to help the rest of the country understand how very wrong this slippery slope we’ve gone down is in terms of incarcerating women, particularly those who are African-American; and the impact it’s had on our children and our communities,” she said.

There are currently more than 200,000 women in prison or jail in the United States. That figure represents an increase of over 800 percent in the past three decades according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).

Of those women in state prisons, more than half have been sentenced for drug or property crimes, which are non-violent offenses. In 2005, just 35 percent of women in prison were convicted of violent offenses, according to the BJS.

The rate of incarceration for African-American women has declined over the last 15 years, dropping 30.7 percent between 2000 and 2009. Yet, they are still imprisoned at nearly three times the rate of White women and have a higher incarceration rate than Hispanic women, according to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group, pressing for reform.

Most of the speakers had friends and relatives who had been incarcerated or were imprisoned at some point themselves. They spoke about their personal experiences with a criminal justice system that they feel punishes communities just as much as individuals. For them, when mothers go behind bars, there are wide-ranging repercussions that intimately affect those around them.

“It’s destroying our communities,” said Patricia Allard, an attorney from New York who spoke at the rally.

“When you take a mother away from her child for a non-violent offense, you are essentially sentencing the child as well,” she said. “People talk about harm reduction around drug use. Instead I’d like to talk about reducing the harm that the prison industrial complex does to families.”

In 2007, approximately 65,600 women in federal and state custody reported being the mothers of 147,400 minor children, according to a BJS special report. It said that 77 percent of incarcerated mothers reported providing most of the daily care for their children before incarceration. Eleven percent of incarcerated mothers reported that their children were being placed in foster care, compared to only two percent of fathers.

For advocates, this is also an issue of human rights.

“These are women who couldn’t even attend their own child’s funeral,” said Dorothy Johnson Speight, the founder and executive director of Mothers in Charge, which works toward violence prevention, education and intervention for youth, young adults, families and community organizations.

Speight says events like the Free Her Rally are important for raising awareness to ultimately bring about change.

If the change in lifestyle isn’t evident when incarcerated women are sentenced, it becomes clear after they are released.

Women face significant obstacles in effectively reentering society and providing for themselves and their children as they find themselves restricted from governmental assistance programs. Some states even impose bans on people with certain convictions working in certain industries such as nursing, child care, and home health care.

In light of this, there has been some progress on incarceration disparities.

The 2010 Fair Sentencing Act narrowed the disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses. In 2013, President Obama granted clemency to 21 individuals (eight commutations and thirteen pardons).

Despite those successes, advocates are looking for more. They say that the passage of the Smarter Sentencing Act would help, but more must be done to heal the cultural scars that harsh or unfair sentences have done to communities.

James is the final speaker. When she is done talking, the crowd bursts out with chants of “Free Her! Free Her!”

James says this is only the beginning and that the next step is building off of their momentum.

“We’re working hard to get commutation for the women we support,” she said. “We’ve been around the country twice with the Free Her Rally, coming together and coalition-building. We want to push the legislation from state to state to make change, and ultimately bring the women in the federal system home too.”

June 23, 2014

DC Football Team Loses Trademarks, Name Ruled to be Racist

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - That racist nickname has been tackled for another loss.The latest setback for the Washington professional football team: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the federal trademarks held by the D.C. team on the name.

“We decide. … that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the board wrote in its opinion.”

Speculation that the decision could prod billionaire owner Daniel Snyder to consider a name change appears to be as solidly grounded as the notion that the moon is made of green cheese. He already has vowed to appeal the decision and expects to win. He’s fended off calls to change the name for the last 14 years, vowing never to do so.

The team has had its nickname since the 1930s and first registered the name as a trademark in 1967. Without a registered trademark, the D.C. team would be unable to protect its brand name or retain the exclusive rights to sell merchandise with the team name and logo.

The financial hit likely would be in the tens of millions of dollars annually.The D.C. team made $2.5 million at last year’s training camp in Richmond, mostly through merchandise sales.Five Native American citizens petitioned the patent office to overturn the team’s six registered trademarks.The named plaintiff in Blackwell v. Pro Football Inc.is Amanda Blackhorse, a Navajo and psychiatric social worker.

“It is a great victory for Native Americans and for all Americans,” Ms. Blackhorse stated. “I hope this ruling brings us a step closer to that inevitable day when the name of the Washington football team would be changed.”The plaintiffs had largely made the same argument as those who filed a trademark suit in 1992. The Patent Office canceled the trademarks in 1999, but the decision was overturned on appeal to federal court. A judge ruled that the petitioners had waited 25 years too long to challenge the trademark.The team is confident the latest decision also will be overturned on appeal.

“We’ve seen this story before,” team attorney Bob Raskopf said in a statement issued shortly after the ruling was announced Wednesday.“And just like last time, today’s ruling will have no effect at all on the team’s ownership and of the right to use the (racist mascot’s) name and logo,” he added. “We are confident we will prevail once again.” The plaintiffs believe that the current decision is based on appropriate grounds that will be upheld. Raymond H. Boone, the late Free Press editor/publisher,was the first newspaper owner in Virginia to ban the use of the D.C. team’s racist nickname from his paper’s news and editorial columns.He announced the ban last year.

President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 50 other U.S. senators are among others who have blasted the racist nickname. Sen. Reid said this week he would never attend another home football game until the team changes a name that he calls a racial slur.

June 22, 2014

The Fight for the South
By Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - With the Republican takeover of the Virginia State Senate, Republicans now control the state legislatures in all 11 former confederate states. Now the reconstruction of the New South that was launched by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson is under assault. King’s movement and Johnson’s presidential power transformed the South after the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Voting Rights Act gave Blacks the right to vote. Civil rights legislation opened up public facilities and launched an era of affirmative actions to overcome segregation. The War on Poverty extended Medicare, food stamps, housing aid, jobs programs and more to the impoverished. The transformation generated its own reaction.

Johnson predicted that Democrats would lose the South for a generation. Under Nixon, the Republican Party adopted a southern strategy, making itself the party of white sanctuary, displacing conservative Democrats. Slowly, Republicans began picking up seats and consolidating their position, even as the country grew more diverse. Barack Obama’s election shocked many white southerners, accelerating the process. Now Republican governors and legislatures across the South are chipping away at the progress that has been made.

Emboldened when the Supreme Court overturned key parts of the Voting Rights Act, they are passing legislation that makes voting harder for working and poor people, disproportionately minorities. And when the Supreme Court affirmed state rights over the expansion of Medicaid in health care reform, Republican governors and legislatures across the South blocked the expansion, depriving millions of poor working families of decent health protection.

Where governors once sought to stand in the schoolhouse door, now they stand at the hospital door. These states are not opposed to federal money. Of the top 10 states with budgets containing the highest percentage of revenue from the federal government, five are in the South — Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia and South Carolina. South Carolina, for example, suffers the third-highest poverty rate in the U.S., with nearly 20 percent of all residents and more than one-fourth of all children in poverty.

Yet, Gov. Nikki Haley has turned her back on $11 billion in federal resources for Medicaid expansion and hundreds of millions for education. The state lobbies for more money for military bases, ports and highways, but turns its back on the poor. Will the progress of the last decades be turned back? Will the Old South block the growth of a New South?

The political threat is clear. Republicans consolidate their position as a party of white sanctuary and dominate elections across the South. National Democrats decide it is not worth investing in those states, with the exception possibly of outliers, like Texas and Florida. The Deep South descends once more into a region of racial reaction. One problem with this is that a reactionary South can have an inordinate influence in our national politics.

We’ve seen how a Republican minority in the Senate, constructed significantly of senators from the southern states, can obstruct sensible reforms, from raising the minimum wage to paycheck fairness to allowing refinancing of student loans at a lower rate. This Republican Party could block steps to strengthen civil rights laws, enforce labor laws, or provide a helping hand to the poor. If the New South is to be revived, the battle must be fought at the state and local level.

As Dr. King taught us, only the victims of oppression can stop their own victimization. A new movement of poor working people — joining across lines of race or gender — must rise to challenge the new reaction. When that movement builds, people of conscience across the country will respond. In North Carolina’s Moral Monday demonstrations, we may be seeing the beginnings of that movement. It is spreading to Georgia and South Carolina. Once more, the battle for the future of the South is joined. We all have a stake in its outcome. 

Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is president/CEO of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition