Transcript

Century of Lies / August 08, 2010

The failure of Drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.

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How big does a lie have to get before it POPS? That’s still to be determined in the Drug War isn’t it? I’m Dean Becker and this is the Century of Lies. We’ve got a couple of great interviews for you and let’s get to it.

Recently, I saw a piece out on Counterpunch. I want to read a bit from it:

“The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.”

“Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that.”

Here to talk about the subject is the author of that piece, he’s the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. I want to welcome, Bill Quigley.

Bill Quigley: Well, thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Dean Becker: Mr. Quigley, again, if you’ll allow. I want to read just a little piece to kind of set this up because I want you to recount what the title of this was, The Fourteen Examples of Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System. And reading once again:

“The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?”

Mr. Quigley, if I could just get you to begin to recount those fourteen examples of rampant racism.

Bill Quigley: Well, thank you. I am a lawyer, a human rights lawyer. I’ve been a civil rights lawyer for about my whole career of about thirty years. I’m a law professor at Layola [University] in New Orleans and as you said, I currently am the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

I have, like most people, known that there was a racial dimension to the criminal justice system for some time but a few weeks ago I started actually looking at it systematically from the beginning to the end. What I came up with, I shared most of it in the article, is that at every single step of this system the racial impact is magnified.

Starting from the point that most arrests in the United States are drug based arrests and that’s the case in big cities and small cities all over the place. It has been an explosion of drug arrests in the last couple of decades and that’s our war on drugs that has been going on though a couple of the last decades.

The documentation shows us that actually that white people and black people consume drugs, possess drugs and sell drugs at roughly the same rate. So, those of us who are white know plenty of people who use drugs and sell drugs. You know, that’s just how life is. African Americans know plenty of people as well.

So, if you start at that point, that African Americans are about 13% of the population and about 13-14% of drug users, then you would expect that the stops, the frisks, the arrests, the trials, the sentences and all those things would be roughly comparable for white people and black people but that’s not actually it at all.

The Sentencing Project, which is a think tank set up in Washington D.C., says that even though African Americans are about 13-14% of the population and the same percentage of monthly drug users, they are over 1/3 of the people who are arrested for drug offences.

So, right off the bat, you start off with essentially the black people being arrested at roughly triple, two or three times the rate of white people. The arrests usually come about in the terms of the interactions with the police.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has done a comprehensive analysis of stops and frisks in the city of New York, our biggest city, and we have found and the police department really doesn’t debate the fact that even though people of color, African Americans, Latinos and others make up about half the population, 80% of the stops by NYPD, in the city were of a Black and Latino people. When they stopped white people, they frisked actually less than one on ten.

This is where a police officer will go up and stop somebody, see if you’ve got ID or whatever. When white people show an ID and whatever, less than 1-in-10 get frisked. When Blacks and Latinos are stopped, asked for this stuff, 85% are frisked, which is ten times the frisking method of white people.

California has done issues about stops. I think most of us understand the “Driving While Black”. A California study has found that Blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than Whites. Similar things they’ve found in New Jersey, Indiana and most every place that’s ever checked this.

So, we have – the first step is really that we use drugs at roughly the same rate. The second step is that Blacks and Latinos are stopped at, in some cases, two and three times as frequently, frisked ten times more frequently.

African Americans are stopped and arrested for drug offenses 2-to-11 times the rates of Whites according to a report by Human Rights Watch, a May 2009 report by Human Rights Watch.

Your listeners can go look and find my article if they’d like. They can just google: Quigley and Criminal Justice and Race. They will find the article. If they want to go into more detail, the May 2009 report on disparity of drug arrests by Human Rights Watch concludes that African Americans are arrested for drug offences at rates 2-to-11 times higher than the rates for Whites. That’s when they are using and selling at roughly the same rates.

Then, the fourth step is that once people are arrested, the next step in the criminal justice process is that people are brought to jail and you can bond out or whatever. We find that even in this step that Blacks are much more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than white people.

The biggest study I’ve found was a New York, an official study of the state of New York, of their division of criminal justice, found that in New York, that Blacks are 33% more likely to be detained – that means staying in jail – are 1/3 more likely to stay in jail awaiting a felony trials than Whites facing trial.

So, you have higher stops, higher frisks, higher arrests and then people are kept in jail

Then we go to the fifth step, which is the fact that people who stay in jail are usually indigent and indigent people usually in the criminal justice system are almost always represented by the public defender system.

Public defenders do a terrific job. They work very, very hard but the system is set up in such a way that public defenders rarely, rarely have the opportunity to really do their job in the same way that prosecutors or private defenders and that.

Part of this is the American Bar Association, which is the national organization of lawyers. It’s a mainstream group. They concluded that all too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent because they don’t really have access – meaningful access – to a lawyer.

I talked to somebody recently, talked about that. I said, “Look, if you’re in jail, you’re arrested for something you don’t think you did and they’re talking about, ‘Look, unless you plead guilty, we going to give you five years. If you plead guilty we’ll give you one year.’ They’re looking at the lawyers, they’re looking at they way the system is set up and people have already been in jail for a couple of months. There’s really a tendency for people to say ‘Look, I’ll plead guilty and take one year in prison for something I didn’t do, rather than go through this whole process and risk having five years in prison for something I didn’t do’.”

The idea of who actually goes to court and who goes to trial, Richard Pryor said it many years ago. He said he never understood what the justice system was until he went down to the criminal courthouse and looked in the courtroom and then he understood because inside was “just us”.

Anybody who looks at any criminal courthouse in any metropolitan area is going to look in and see who the people that are in handcuffs waiting to be tried, who are the people that are sitting on the outside waiting to be tried, who are the family members that are there and you can recognize that even at that stage of the process which is still not really half way through the process, it’s overwhelmingly African American people that are subjected to the process.

Say you’re in jail, you get a lawyer and you decide to go to trial. If you go to trial and you’re hoping to get a jury of your peers, which is what the Constitution requires, you can find—and again in most major metropolitan areas in the country that African Americans are frequently, illegally, excluded from jury service in criminal cases.

There is a study that was just out in June of this year from the Equal Justice Initiative showing the illegal exclusion of African Americans from criminal jury service, all over the South and some of the other places as well.

They gave an example of one county in Alabama that 8 out of 10 African Americans who were qualified for jury service was stuck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases. The most important cases, the cases that are really analyzed have often had pretty good lawyers at that stage, so that just adds to the criminal part of the criminal justice system.

Dean Becker: We are speaking with Mr. Bill Quigley, he’s legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and he’s recounting for us a recent piece he had on Counterpunch, Fourteen Examples of Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System. If you would continue, Mr. Quigley.

Bill Quigley: Ok. I’m up to seven and again it goes into the idea of plea-bargaining. We’ve already talked about who’s arrested, who’s stopped, who’s frisked, who gets bail, who has a chance to have their own lawyer, that sort of stuff.

Most people see TV and they think there’s a lot of jury trails and that but actually there’s very, very few cases in the criminal justice system that actually go to trial. Maybe 3%, 5%, certainly less than 10% in any courthouse and the rest are plea-bargained.

When you are plea-bargained, you are faced with – you’re calculating what you’re odds are to be able to get justice out of this system.

Young African American males, who are the prime defendants in the criminal justice system, they don’t have confidence in the system and they may know, know well, the examples that I’m documenting in this article. So people, as I said, who wouldn’t rather do three years or a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime that they didn’t commit.

The eighth point is that even at sentencing, once people have plead guilty or been found guilty, a recent study by the US Sentencing Commission found that black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the exact same crimes.

That’s two people in two different courtrooms, pleading guilty to the same crime, over and over and over again across the United States. In federal courts, African Americans defendants are receiving longer sentences than white defendants for the exact same crime.

This sentencing project shows that African Americans are much more likely to receive the mandatory minimum sentences and 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison at all than white drug defendants for the same crimes.

The system just continues to systematically grind up people on the basis of race.

The ninth point, is again, the testimony in Congress by Mark Mauer, who is an expert on sentencing, looked at sentences across the country and he showed that the people who get the longest sentence are almost always non-white people.

So 2/3s of the people in the United States with life sentences are non-white and that’s not just in the South. In New York it’s even higher than that, it’s 83%. Across the country 2 out of 3 people who have life in prison are African American or Latino.

The tenth point is that, you look at who actually is in prison. This is sort of short stitches together some of those earlier points. Remember, African Americans and Whites roughly use drugs at the same rate. African Americans are arrested for drugs 2-to-11 times more. Actually when you get into who is in prison, 56% in state prisons are there for drug offenses – 56% of people in state prisons are African Americans for drug offenses.

Yet Whites and Blacks are using, selling, possessing and dealing drugs at roughly the same rate. So, as a consequence of this, you get to the US Bureau of Drug Statistics that says that an African American male, born in this century – not back in slavery or segregation but this century – has a 1-in-3 chance of going to jail in their lifetime, whereas white males have about a 6% chance.

So young, when going to the hospital, the African American babies are five times as likely to end up in prison as the white babies. That’s just such a terrible thing. It applies even to Latinos as well. Not quite as much as African Americans but roughly three times as likely as white young males.

The thing goes through juveniles – again, juvenile African Americans are 16% of the juvenile population, 28% of the juvenile arrests, 1/3 of those in jail and over half of the youth are sent to adult prisons.

This is really Affirmative Action that people criticize, Affirmative Action in the criminal justice system. The impact, we have to remember that most people don’t notice or don’t really pay attention to it.

We in the United States, put more – a higher percentage of people in jail and prison than any country in the world. We have roughly 5% of the world’s population but we put in 25% of the world’s prisoners.

We put people in jail at a rate of five times the average around the world. We have over two million people behind bars. That’s more than Russia and China and India, than all the biggest countries. It’s much, you know, we put people in jail at a much higher rate than they do in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, any of these places, Korea, any place that we want to talk about.

So, when we look at African Americans put in jail in the United States, there’s really a very aggressive, very accelerated rate of putting African American males in jail. As a consequence of all these things, when people are looking for jobs, when you’re looking for a job, an arrest record hinders you.

Having spent some time waiting for trial hinders you but a conviction or some time in jail does hinder you. Clearly then, African Americans who have been arrested and jailed at much higher rates have much more of a hurdle to jump over than people who haven’t been arrested.

Even here, you see the intersection of racism and the criminal justice system, sort of accelerating each other. Sort of like fire and gas, in that white people with criminal records, actually have a better chance of getting a job than African American people without criminal records. That’s a study done by the University of Wisconsin and it just shows that the racism in employment circumstances is aggravated by the criminal justice system as well.

You end up with these fourteen things. This is from the moment that you intersect with the police officers, to arrest, to trial, to sentencing, to time in prison, to time out of prison. You see it in every single step of the criminal justice system.

African Americans are treated much, much worse and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people. As a result, I think it’s pretty hard to say that our system is anything other than literally a criminal racist justice system.

Dean Becker: Once again, we’ve been speaking with Mr. Bill Quigley. He’s the legal director, Center for Constitutional Rights.

Bill, I saw in that article that you talked about the book, recently released by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. We had her on our show a few weeks back. Her book was astounding. It’s a real eye opener, is it not?

Bill Quigley: It is. She has done us all a tremendous service by analyzing the criminal justice system in a way that helps us understand it from start to bottom. Your listeners will remember, she sees the war on drugs and the explosion of the jails and prisons in all of our cities and states as the new “Jim Crow”. That’s the name of her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

She sees it, as just as after slavery, since slavery was a way to keep African Americans. Once African Americans were freed, then the whole system of “Jim Crow” and segregation was put into place to try to hold African Americans down.

Once the civil rights revolution occurred, to say that it was illegal to discriminate against African Americans in housing, employment, voting and those sorts of things then there was the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system.

From her point of view and I think the facts bare it out, that this system has taken the place of slavery. This system had taken the place of legal segregation as a way to manage, control, discipline and marginalize millions of people in our country.

She calls it the new “caste system”, which is the system used in India and other countries to sort of keep people in their place. This is part of the way that keeps people in their place.

She makes a very, I think, a very important point about white people as well, which is that we all know white people, young white people who’ve been arrested for drugs or people in college that have made mistakes with drugs and stuff like that.

What happens in those circumstances, they may get arrested but Daddy or Mommy calls the District Attorney and they get out of jail and then they get a fancy lawyer. Maybe they’ll go to, like Lindsey Lohan, they’ll go to a special rehab place or something like that and as a result, they don’t end up having a record.

So poor whites and others are subjected to the same system, the criminal justice system because – as a warning, that if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worse possible treatment because they’ll get treated just like poor Blacks.

Dean Becker: Well, Bill Quigley, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, I want to thank you for joining us here on the Drug Truth Network. Would you please share your website with our listeners?

Bill Quigley: Yes, I’d be happy to. We are the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is ccrjustice.org. If people do that they’ll see what we’re working on and we’d love to hear something from them as well. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this.

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( music)

This bud’s so good, that when I smoke it, the government freaks out.

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I’m a big fan of Italian food but I’ve never heard of anybody being able to infuse cannabis into it. But, here to give us a lesson on cooking with cannabis is an instructor from Oaksterdam University, Professor Sandy Moriarty.

Professor Sandy Moriarty: Well, hello Dean. It’s great to talk to you today. I’m looking forward to teaching all our listeners about how to infuse cannabis into Italian food. Once you’ve learned to make my cannabutter, which I’ll share with all the listeners, they can infuse the butter, basically into anything.

So let’s talk a little bit about our favorite tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce. So, what you want to do is heat in a large skillet, over medium heat and two tablespoons of olive oil and add one small onion (finely chopped), one small carrot (finely chopped), one celery rib with leaves (finely chopped), two tablespoons of parsley (finely chopped).

You want to cover these ingredients and cook over a low heat and stirring occasionally until the vegetables become very soft, in about 15-20 minutes. Then, at this point, we’ll want to add two small garlic cloves (minced), one tablespoon of chopped basil, one tablespoon of chopped rosemary, one tablespoon of chopped sage and add that to our mixture.

Then, at this point, we want to stir in 1¾ pound of ripe tomatoes peeled and coarsely chopped, 2 tablespoons of tomato paste, ¾ teaspoons of salt, ¼ teaspoon of black pepper.
You can add more salt and pepper to taste.

You simmer uncovered, crushing the tomatoes on the side of the pot with a spoon to break them up until the sauce has thickened. Cook this mixture for about 15-20 minutes. Pass through a food mill, if desired or leave chunky.

At this point add your desired amount of cannabutter. One cup is very satisfying for a group or a family of 6-8 people. Simmer for about half an hour until all of your ingredients have blended and married beautifully. At this point, turn your sauce on to simmer.

Now we want to make our lasagna. So the specific noodles for lasagna would be the wide, flat lasagna noodles. We want to boil the noodles to a semi-soft consistency and they’ll turn soft in the baking of the lasagna.

So, you preheat your over to 375º and start at the bottom by spooning out a layer of sauce. Then add a layer of lasagna noodles. Totally, you’ll need 15 ounces of ricotta cheese, 1 pound of mozzarella cheese (thinly sliced or shredded), ½ a cup plus 2 tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese and one pound of lasagna noodles.

You add your sauce to the bottom of a glass, 9x13 inch pan. You put in a layer of sauce first, so the noodles don’t stick to the bottom of the pan, then noodles, then a layer of the ricotta cheese and then a layer of the mozzarella cheese.

Then spoon about ½ or ¼ cup of the sauce over this layer. Then you start the process all over again. Doing the sauce, the noodles, the ricotta cheese, the mozzarella cheese and do this until you get to the top of your pan.

At this point you want to finish off the lasagna pan with sauce. Make sure you have plenty of sauce so that your lasagna cooks perfectly.

Then to top it off, you take the two tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese and sprinkle them over the top. At this point, you want to bake it in the oven for about an hour. Let stand for 15 minutes and serve hot.

Now to go with this lasagna, the best thing in the world to compliment it would be cannabis garlic bread. This is as simple as taking cannabutter and buttering a beautiful piece of French bread and then adding some garlic powder or crushed garlic – whichever your favorite is – and broil this under the broiler until golden brown.

Now you have the greatest Italian cannabis dinner that you could ever imagine. It comes with a warning for your family and friends though. Tell them to bring their pillows because with a cup of cannabis butter in there and the cannabis garlic bread, that really packs a punch. So, you better plan on having your guests spend the weekend.

That’s the best way. You can also use this sauce that you’ve infused with all other types of noodles, like spaghetti and the angel hair and the different bowties and the different kind of pastas.

To answer the question, you now know how to make the best Italian food in the world. I just want to offer you all happy cooking. This is Sandy Moriarty from Oaksterdam University, Cooking 101.

Happy cooking to all of you! Thanks.

Dean Becker: She says, it’s best to make two pans of lasagna, one without the cannabis butter. One for effect and one for the munchies you’re bound to get. The full cup of cannabutter is indeed a very, very powerful infusion of cannabis. Be careful.

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Please remember there is no justification for this Drug War. Visit our website, endprohibition.org.

Prohibido istac evilesco!

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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker. Asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.

The Century of Lies.

This show produced at Pacifica Studios at KPFT, Houston.

Drug Truth Network programs, archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.

Transcript provided by: Ayn Morgan of www.eigengraupress.com