[gpga-news] GA Green Party To Make Mass Incarceration a Political Issue in 2010

[Bruce Dixon]

Georgia Green Party Set to Contest 2010 Elections
on Issue of Black Mass Incarceration

At a recent strategic planning retreat in Dublin Georgia,
members of the Georgia Green Party's state committee
agreed in principal to make challenging public policies which
have created Black Mass Incarceration, a focus of its 2010
candidate recruitment efforts.

"Public discussions of these policies are deracialized," wrote
Bruce Dixon, an incoming member of the Georgia Party's state
committee, four years ago in the weekly publication he edits,
BlackAgendaReport.com.  "(T)heir racially disparate impacts
are a seldom discussed but widely known fact."

"Green Party candidates will help Georgians question the
incarceration binge by conducting campaigns for Sherrif,
DA and State Assembly which openly challenge the failed
experiments of mass incarceration and correctional and
probation privatization," said Dixon.  "These strategies have
not contributed to public safety and in fact have drained
resources from programs that would."

In "One in Thirty-One: The Long Reach of American Corrections",
published this past Spring by the Pew Center on the States,
the data shows that Georgia, with its one in thirteen adults
under correctional control, has the dubious honor of driving
the trend, followed by Utah (1:18), DC (1:21), Texas (1:22),
Massachusetts (1:24), Ohio (1:25) and the national average
(1:31).  Compare those numbers with New Hampshire (1:88),
Maine (1:81), Utah (1:64).

"We cannot build a beloved community, until we have dismantled
the modern vestiges of slavery which still tarnish our nation,"
said Hugh Esco, who in 1998 campaigned on the Green ticket
for Lieutenant Governor, challenging the Miller administration
on the moral depravity of tripling Georgia prison capacity in
his two terms as Governor.

Greens have long called for:

* a halt to the incarceration of juveniles for nonviolent
offenses;

* a thorough re-examination of so-called "zero-tolerance"
policies implemented in Georgia's public schools which have
unnecessarily criminalized young people to the detriment of
the educational mission;

* that incarcerated juveniles be segregated from adults
convicts;

* an end to trying juveniles as adults and incarcerating
juveniles with adults;

* the repeal of all mandatory minimum sentencing legislation;

* an end to all privatized prisons and jails, and the swift
phasing out of piecemeal privatization of inmate health,
food services and other functions;

* an end to the price gouging and cronyism rampant in state
contracting permitting private profiteers to exploit the
families of inmates for toll phone calls and other services;

* a restorative justice system and the protection of the human
rights of offenders.

"Greens are concerned by the rising use of privatized probation
services," said Dixon.  "The predatory practices of these court
sanctioned loan sharks is an oppressive regime exercising a
corrupting influence on democratic governance."

"The rising use of public policy imposed criminal sanctions
to create captive workforces, more and more under the private
management, has condemned the hours and working conditions
of so called free labor to a downward spiral," said Esco.
"Our racism harms white families scrapping for a living in ways
perhaps more subtle than our Black and Latino neighbors, more of
whose families directly face the gulag, but these policies hurt
all our families, whether our own brother is doing time or not."

"More now so than when I first wrote those words, the shadow
of prison squats at the corners of, and often at the center of
nearly every black family's life in this nation," said Dixon,
a Cobb County Georgia based journalist.  "I'm excited that the
Green Party affords us with a vehicle to raise these important
issues in meaningful ways.  I look forward to electing Green
sherriffs and DA's who can begin to right these wrongs.
We can not expect the Democrats who created these issues and
colluded with the corrupting impact of privatization to craft
a way out of this mess."

-- 30 --

Why Democrats and Republicans Won't Confront Black Mass Incarceration,
and Why The Green Party Will
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-democrats-and-republicans-wont-confront-black-mass-incarceration-and-why-green-party-wil

Platform of the Georgia Green Party
http://www.greens.org/georgia.static/pdf/GvrnDocs/Platform-2003.pdf

One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=49398
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/PSPP_1in31_report_FINAL_WEB_3-26-09.pdf
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewcenteronthestatesorg/Fact_Sheets/PSPP_1in31_factsheet_GA.pdf