The Drug War & Misplaced Priorities: A report from NAACP

2011-04-07 "Misplaced Priorities: A new report from NAACP"
[http://www.naacp.org/pages/misplaced-priorities]
On April 7th, the NAACP released a new report, Misplaced Priorities, that examines America's escalating levels of prison spending and its impact on state budgets and our nation’s children.
Misplaced Priorities tracks the steady shift of state funds away from education and toward the criminal justice system. Researchers have found that over-incarceration most often impacts vulnerable and minority populations, and that it destabilizes communities.
 The report is part of the “Smart and Safe Campaign,” and the NAACP is urging everyone to sign its petition to urge governors to adopt a set of recommendations that will help policymakers in all 50 states downsize prison populations and shift the savings to education budgets.
 Below are profiles of the six cities studied in the report, as well as three profiled individuals. Download the full report [http://action.naacp.org/page/-/Criminal%20Justice/MisplacedPrioritiesFINALV2.pdf].



2011-04-07 "Newt Gingrich supports 'Misplaced Priorities', NAACP Criminal Justice Reform Principles" 
[http://www.naacp.org/blog/entry/newt-gingrich-supports-misplaced-priorities-naacp-criminal-justice-reform-r]
Today the NAACP held remarkable press conference in Washington, DC bringing together diverse voices from the left and the right to support our new Criminal Justice report. Politico's Ben Smith notes, "It seems like an unlikely conservative cause, but jails are, among other things, big government; they're also, often, pork. And so the NAACP has recruited another unlikely ally, Grover Norquist, to its press conference at the National Press Club this afternoon for a report titled, 'Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate.'"

The full letter is below:
APRIL 7, 2011
LETTER FROM SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH
I would like to thank President Jealous and the NAACP for allowing me to say a few words regarding our pressing need for criminal justice reform that will strengthen American families and communities.
We have a wonderful window of opportunity right now to achieve lasting change in the way in which we rehabilitate our offenders and break the devastating cycle of crime and incarceration in many of our neighborhoods. The report released today highlights many innovative solutions that rightly emphasize rehabilitation, aim to reduce recidivism rates, and fortify communities across the country that have been ravaged by mass incarceration.
The effects of rampant incarceration in recent years have been devastating for families, neighborhoods and civil society. Some of the statistics are staggering: as the Pew Center on the States reported in 2009, there are blocks in the East Side of Detroit where one in seven males in currently under some type of correctional control.
This is a tragedy, and is simply not sustainable.
An effective criminal justice system emphasizes that actions have consequences and that breaking the law must be met with swift and proportionate punishment. However, many wonderful state and local programs have recently proven that options besides incarceration are optimal for many non-violent offenders. And, when incarceration is necessary, we have a societal obligation to ensure that we use the time that the offender must give up to ensure a healthy transition back to his community and to his family as a responsible citizen.
Last year alone, we spent $68 billion on corrections in the United States - 300 percent more than 25 years ago. With this increased spending, one would hope that we would have seen successes in rehabilitation, recidivism rates, and stronger and safer communities. The results are mostly disappointing: half of this year’s released prisoners are expected to return to prison within three years. If our prison policies are failing half of the time, and we know that there are more humane alternatives – especially alternatives that do not involve spending billions more on more prisons —it is time to fundamentally rethink how we treat and rehabilitate our prisoners.
The NAACP report that is being released today, “Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate,” is a critical step in advancing our national dialogue on criminal justice reform. The report highlights the ways in which our budget priorities have been skewed in recent decades, but goes on to illuminate many of the promising practices that have allowed states to intelligently reduce their prison populations and use limited resources more humanely and effectively.
The states have proven that there are innovative, data-driven approaches to reform, from community supervision programs, to more far-reaching treatment services, to more effective reentry programs. From the excellent reentry programs being developed in Michigan, to the Texas reforms that have prioritized treatment over prison time for drug offenders, the states are leading the way in building criminal justice institutions that serve our communities best.
These issues transcend partisan lines and should be of concern to Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike. Conservatives, such as myself, should not consider criminal justice reform off-limits, and I am pleased that our movement has begun to tackle these issues head-on. I recently joined with other conservative leaders to announce a Right on Crime Campaign, which challenges states to make sensible and proven reforms to our criminal justice system—policies that will strengthen the families, neighborhood institutions, and places of worship that we as conservatives believe are the central pillars of society.
The recommendations in this report should be examined closely both here in Washington, DC, and in every state capital, in order to seek their own corrections policies that strengthen our community institutions, make our neighborhoods safer, and ensure that our dollars are spent responsibly.
Again, I thank you for allowing me to be a part of this event. I am truly excited by our partnership, and look forward to working with the NAACP and other faith- and community-based groups on this issue, and any other issue where we can come together to make Americans safer, our communities stronger and our government more effective.
Sincerely,
Newt Gingrich


2011-07-29 "NAACP Issues Call to End the Drug War"
[http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2011/07/1224-naacp-end-drug-war.html]
Earlier this week at its 102nd Annual Convention in Los Angeles, the NAACP issued a resolution entitled, “A Call to End the War on Drugs, Allocate Funding to Investigate Substance Abuse Treatment, Education, and Opportunities in Communities of Color for A Better Tomorrow.” While the text of the resolution will not be available until its national board approves it in October, a press statement following the vote criticized the drug war as discriminatory, costly, and counterproductive [http://www.naacp.org/press/entry/naacp-passes-historic-resolution-calling-for-end-to-war-on-drugs].
"These flawed drug policies that have been mostly enforced in African American communities must be stopped and replaced with evidenced-based practices that address the root causes of drug use and abuse in America," said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP.
The statement went on to lament the drug war’s overreliance on punitive measures. "The only thing we've accomplished is becoming the world's largest incarcerator, sending people with mental health and addiction issues to prison, and creating a system of racial disparities that rivals Jim Crow policies of the 1960s," said Robert Rooks, director of the NAACP Criminal Justice Program.
Approval of the resolution came just months after the NAACP launched its "Smart and Safe Campaign," [http://www.naacp.org/page/s/misplacedprioritiespetition] which is aimed at avoiding "spending too much money sending people to prison, and not enough to make sure they never get there." The campaign’s priorities include eliminating disparities in drug laws, abolishing mandatory minimums, creating diversion programs for problematic drug users rather than incarcerating them, and expunging the criminal records of those who do not reoffend after a certain number of years. 
In April, the NAACP accompanied the announcement of its new campaign with the release of its report entitled "Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate." [http://naacp.3cdn.net/ecea56adeef3d84a28_azsm639wz.pdf]
It found that the rate of corrections spending outpaced that of education with state spending on prisons growing at six times higher education during the last 30 years. "As our misplaced investments in prisons increase, the bright futures of many of our young people decrease—which is why we must begin now to change course and invest in education over incarceration," the report stated.
It also noted the impact of unequal treatment under law primarily due to the drug war: "Racial disparities in arrests, sentencing, and incarceration continue to challenge the integrity of our criminal justice system…While Americans of all races and ethnicities use illegal drugs at a rate proportionate to their total population representation, African Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times the rate of their white counterparts. Not only are African Americans and Latinos over-represented in the criminal justice system, but they are also more likely to experience lethal violence and victimization in that system."
Much of the NAACP’s criticisms echoed the findings of a recent report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy [http://globalcommissionondrugs.org/Report], which declared the global war on drugs a failure and recommended that it be replaced by decriminalization strategies grounded in science, health, security and human rights.  The report was issued last month which coincided with the 40th anniversary of when President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490].
Watch Ben Jealous and conservative leader Grover Norquist discuss the new NAACP's report "Misplaced Priorities" with PBS's Judy Woodroff on Newshour:

Watch NAACP Report Calls Shift in Funding Toward Prisons 'Alarming' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.