United States News
See other United States News Articles
Title: Former Federal Judge Slams Drug War, Compares Effects to Aftermath of World War II
Source:
The Anti-Media
URL Source: http://theantimedia.org/former-federal-judge-slams-drug-war/
Published: Jun 30, 2015
Author: Carey Wedler
Post Date: 2015-07-01 09:33:30 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 1008
Comments: 19
This weekend, a former federal judge delivered a scathing rebuke on the Drug War—the same one she spent 17 years waging. In a brief talk at The Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, Nancy Gertner—who was nominated to the bench by Bill Clinton in 1994— highlighted many elements of the failed federal policy. She even went so far as to compare the effects of the Drug War to the aftermath of World War II, suggesting a similar post-war strategy to deal with the modern catastrophe. Gertner said she handed down 500 sanctions during her tenure, the vast majority of which were unjustified. “80 percent I believe were unfair and disproportionate…I left the bench in 2011 to join the Harvard faculty to write about those stories––to write about how it came to pass that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly, made no sense under any philosophy,” she said. She also detailed well-documented, racist elements of the Drug War: “This is a war that I saw destroy lives…[It] eliminated a generation of African American men, covered our racism in ostensibly neutral guidelines and mandatory minimums which were only applied or largely applied to African American men…[and] created an intergenerational problem––although I wasn’t on the bench long enough to see this, we know that the sons and daughters of the people we sentenced are in trouble, and are in trouble with the criminal justice system.” The devastation is so bad, she argues, it is comparable to that of World War II: “We were not leveling cities as we did in World War II with bombs, but with prosecution, prison, and punishment.” Based on this comparison, she advocates a program similar to the Marshall Plan—which helped rebuild a war-ravaged Europe following the war— to help resolve the disastrous ramifications of the decades-long War on Drugs. “The Marshall Plan was unique because it set out not to punish those who had been defeated—and sow the seeds of future rebellion and future rage—but to rebuild, to look to the future and not to the past,” she said. Gertner has attempted to repent for her own part in the Drug War. With the Gertner Clemency Project, she is reviewing the list of people she personally sentenced to find those who deserve clemency. Nevertheless, she acknowledges this is not enough. “The impact of the criminal justice system that I presided over in my small way was systemic. Our response to it has to be systemic,” she argued. In her own advocacy of a Marshall Plan for the Drug War, Gertner calls for a four-pronged approach: 1. Physical, to release victims of the Drug War from prison; 2. Economic, to rebuild communities destroyed by drug policy; 3. Psychological, to deal with the trauma of the war; 4. Political, to restore political participation. Though the Drug War is still very much in effect, Gertner is part of a growing number of former members of law enforcement and the justice system who now oppose the draconian policies. As Gertner said, “We finished a war on drugs, and though we were not remotely the victors of that war, we need a big idea in order to deal with those who were its victims. We need a plan to reconstruct neighborhoods, not countries to be sure. We need a plan to stop punishing, as which is all that [sic] we have done in the past…and to start rebuilding.”
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Deckard (#0)
This liberal pig is a younger version of Ruth the twat Ginsberg. "Gertner published her memoirs, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, in 2011. The book focuses on the period during which she worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer before joining the Federal bench in 1994.[8] Gertner is married to John Reinstein, former Legal Director for the Massachusetts ACLU." I'm the infidel... Allah warned you about. كافر المسلح
Question #1 to the judge: How many drug users did you send to prison? Her honest answer would be "none". Meaning these were drug dealers and drug traffickers. Question #2: What kind of philosophy says it's OK for drug dealers and drug traffickers to operate in our midst? Her honest answer would be "none". "... a former federal judge delivered a scathing rebuke on the Drug War" Really? So all drugs should be legal to everyone? That's her solution? "It] eliminated a generation of African American men, covered our racism in ostensibly neutral guidelines and mandatory minimums which were only applied or largely applied to African American men…" Yeah, well, it's largely African American men who are drug dealers. Maybe she should focus on that instead. Then there'd be fewer arrests of African American men.
White dealers will replace them. During Prohibition focusing on blacks would not solve anything.
The true "victims" were their addict customers, including children, who they sold to. Who's going to release them? "2. Economic, to rebuild communities destroyed by drug policy;" The communities were destroyed by the drug dealing gangs. Let them re-build the community they destroyed. Hell, they've got more money than we do.
In the inner city? Let's see. Arrest and incarcerate all the black drug dealers and replace them with white drug dealers. What could possibly go wrong? "During Prohibition focusing on blacks would not solve anything." Or Asians. Or midgets.
Whoa! Stop right there. No need to read any further. We know what's coming.
Though the Drug War is still very much in effect, Gertner is part of a growing number of former members of law enforcement and the justice system who now oppose the draconian policies. Banks and financial institutions have long been suspected of using illegal drug sales as a source of profit. “In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” said Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in January of 2009. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.” Former Managing Director and board member of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, says banks launder imponderable amounts of drug money. “According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion – $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade,” writes Fitts. The CIA has long secured the lucrative global drug market for Wall Street and for its own operational “off-the-books” purposes. “The CIA’s operational directorate, in other words that’s their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine,” Guerrilla News Network reported in an interview with Christopher Simpson. The CIA has been in the drug running business since the 1950s. In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Latin America, and Afghanistan, the CIA — also known as the “Cocaine Import Agency” — has remained at the forefront of the international illicit drug trade. The journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News tied the CIA and the Contras to a large crack cocaine ring in Los Angeles. Webb paid with his life for revealing this information to the public. Ooooh. A "growing number". Well, until that number reaches 51% they're just pissin' in the wind. Given that only about 5% of the population supports legalizing all drugs, it ain't gonna be anytime soon.
Let's see,here. She is a leftist Dim former judge nominated by Bubba,and she spend years strictly enforcing the laws she now claims are unjust,and is also claiming it was the War on Drugs that created ghetto rats,and not the welfare system put in place by the Dims? And NOW she wants to spend even more public money to further enslave the blacks she sent to prison that went to prison because they were paid not to work so they sold drugs because they had all that time on their hands and no jobs? Also note has she has nothing to say about sending lower and middle-class whites to prison. Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
I bet you still believe in Santa and the Easter bunny,don't you? Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
HorseHillary! She just wants to feel good about herself while spending billions of public dollars to provide welfare families with new homes and bigger paychecks to make sure they stay on the Dim Plantation and out of her neighborhood. Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)
$1 trillion over 40 years, huh? That's $25 billion per year -- average. Even current spending is only half that. Our federal budget is about $4 trillion. That puts federal drug war spending at .4%, with half that money going to border patrol, overseas drug interdiction and local drug treatment programs.
When you libtards bitch about the cost of prisons, you never wanna talk about how much convicts cost in welfare, while out of prison, free health care, free attorney fees (for repeated crimes), court costs and the cost on society to be victimized over and over again. Your weakness is a criminals strength. I'm the infidel... Allah warned you about. كافر المسلح
Just in case you did not click on the link: [...] On a balmy California afternoon in May of 2000, when most kids his age were celebrating the end of the school year, Louis Vasquez sat in the air-conditioned depths of the San Jose juvenile hall. He'd been behind bars since the summer before, ostensibly because he was involved in a fight. But the truth is a little more complicated. Louis, then 17, was locked up not just because of his own transgressions but also because his mother, Diane, is an ex-offender. Her incarceration cost her custody of Louis and his younger brother, Joey; left without his mother, Louis soon wound up in a cell himself. [...] Researchers believe that over 10 million kids have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. Many, like Louis Vasquez, continue to feel the repercussions of that loss. Made virtual orphans by the drug war and other "tough on crime" measures that have sent the prison population skyrocketing to a record 2 million, many children of prisoners grow up in foster care, with grandparents or other relatives, or bouncing among an array of temporary caretakers. According to studies by the Los Angeles-based Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, a research and service organization, as many as 90 percent of children in long-term foster care have a parent who has been arrested or incarcerated. The result is what Ida McCray -- a former inmate who runs the San Francisco-based prisoner support organization Families With a Future -- calls "the largest separation of families since slavery." [...] Imprisoning a low-level offender like Diane Vasquez, whose rap sheet consists mainly of drug offenses, costs the state about $2,100 a month. But that's only page one of the bill. Warehousing her kids is where it really gets expensive. Keeping a teenage boy like Louis in juvenile hall costs about $5,000 a month, and keeping a youngster like Joey in a children's shelter runs another $5,000 per month. The social cost of jailing small-time criminals like Vasquez, and of relegating their children to the juvenile justice and social welfare bureaucracies, goes well beyond dollars. The children of prisoners are "at risk" for just about everything a child can be at risk for: truancy, teen pregnancy, drug use, gang involvement, crime. According to Denise Johnston, head of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents, up to half of all male children of prisoners will go on to commit crimes themselves, perpetuating a cycle that will feed the prison boom for generations to come. Certainly, some kids face grave risks in the hands of drug-addicted or crime-prone parents. But even for them, the loss of a parent is often deeply damaging. Researchers who have interviewed offenders' children have found them likely to experience depression, anger, shame, and self-loathing in the wake of a parent's incarceration. Ellen Barry, founding director of San Francisco-based Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, notes that many young children experience a parent's arrest as simple abandonment. Cristina Jose-Kampfner studied the children of incarcerated parents while a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1985 and found that many showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress reaction. Seventy-five percent of the 5- to 16-year-olds she surveyed reported symptoms such as depression, difficulty sleeping or concentrating, or flashbacks to their parent's crimes or arrests. Johnston says she has seen children stop eating, or even become mute, upon losing a parent to prison. [...] According to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 67 percent of the parents in federal prison are drug offenders whose sentences average more than 10 years. For children of nonviolent drug offenders in particular, the experience can be morally as well as emotionally corrosive: They may lose respect for a legal system that, in their eyes, has shown their parents so little in the way of justice. "I learned that people really don't care who you are and what you did," says Phillip Gaines, 16, whose mother was sentenced to 19 years in a Florida federal penitentiary on drug conspiracy charges. The primary evidence against her was the testimony of admitted drug dealers who cut a deal with authorities. "At the time it made me feel like right was just wrong," says Gaines. Diane Vasquez was in and out of jail when her children were small. Then, in 1995, she was arrested again and convicted of drug possession. A 10-year-old burglary conviction qualified this as a second strike under California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, and Vasquez wound up spending the next 32 months in prison. Like most women prisoners -- many of whom are incarcerated in remote facilities hours from their children's homes and have no one willing or able to bring the children to visit -- Vasquez did not see her children once during that time. After her release from prison, Vasquez got an electronics manufacturing job but soon lost it after she took too many afternoons off to see her "doctor" -- actually her parole officer, something she didn't want her boss to know about. She moved on to a warehouse job at Cisco Systems but was recently laid off. A federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families grant -- a standard assist to unemployed women with children -- would allow Vasquez to care for her kids at a cost to taxpayers of just $520 a month. But under California's rules for administering TANF grants, as a convicted drug offender Vasquez is ineligible for cash assistance. With no income and no permanent address, her prospects of getting her boys back are dim. So on that early May afternoon, Joey remained in the children's shelter and Louis sat in juvenile hall. Louis was visibly depressed -- he had tried to slit his wrists with a jagged piece of plastic -- and his aspirations were profoundly limited. He was going to school inside juvenile hall but didn't expect to earn a high school diploma. "I'm not working towards that," he explained flatly. He aimed to get "whatever" kind of job once released. A year later, Louis, now 18, is still in the custody of juvenile authorities. [...]
#2. To: Deckard (#0)
"that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly, made no sense under any philosophy,”
#3. To: misterwhite (#2)
Yeah, well, it's largely African American men who are drug dealers. Maybe she should focus on that instead
#4. To: Deckard (#0)
"Gertner calls for a four-pronged approach: 1. Physical, to release victims of the Drug War from prison;"
#5. To: A Pole (#3)
"White dealers will replace them."
#6. To: Deckard (#0)
"I left the bench in 2011 to join the Harvard faculty"
#7. To: A Pole, misterwhite, GrandIsland (#3)
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts
#8. To: hondo68, sneakypete, A K A Stone, Excalibur, Operation 40, Orwellian Nightmare, Fred Mertz (#0)
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts
#9. To: misterwhite (#2)
"... a former federal judge delivered a scathing rebuke on the Drug War"
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts
#10. To: misterwhite, GrandIsland, Gatlin, drug warriors (#2)
Opium Trade Floats Wall Street
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts
#11. To: Deckard (#9)
"Gertner is part of a growing number of former members of law enforcement and the justice system who now oppose the draconian policies."
#12. To: misterwhite (#11)
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts
#13. To: Deckard (#0)
Based on this comparison, she advocates a program similar to the Marshall Plan—which helped rebuild a war-ravaged Europe following the war— to help resolve the disastrous ramifications of the decades-long War on Drugs.
#14. To: misterwhite (#4)
The true "victims" were their addict customers, including children, who they sold to.
#15. To: Deckard (#9)
Though the Drug War is still very much in effect, Gertner is part of a growing number of former members of law enforcement and the justice system who now oppose the draconian policies.
#16. To: Deckard (#12)
#17. To: misterwhite (#16)
$1 trillion over 40 years, huh? That's $25 billion per year -- average.
#18. To: A Pole (#17)
#19. To: GrandIsland (#18)
When you libtards bitch about
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]