. We need the welfare population to go to jail and the children of farmers to guard them.
The shame of the Welfare Reform Act '96
Pew Report...
Washington, DC - 02/28/2008 - For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison.
1 of every 265 American Women are in prison.
The Pew Report states that the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10. AP
Since 1999, women are still the fastest growing segment of the Ohio prison population.
In the following graph, you can see that from 1999 until 2004 in many states the population of incarcerated women soared.
In Ohio the male population is declining while the women's numbers are increasing.
Bureau of Justice Statistics*PDF
The new Pew Center Report confirms that this trend is continuing.
Who are these Women?
Why are so many young women in prison? What are the underlying reasons that this trend started in 1999?
"Today, we are ending welfare as we know it." Bill Clinton
According to Loïc Wacquant, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Institute for Legal Research, Boalt Law School, University of California at Berkeley, where he is affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology, the Global Metropolitan Studies Program, and the Center for Urban Ethnography...
...President Bill Clinton has been declaring just how proud he is to have put an end to "big government" and the commission for reform of the federal state, chaired by his would-be successor, Vice-President Al Gore, has been busy pruning public sector programmes and jobs. Meanwhile, 213 new prisons have been built - a figure that does not include the private institutions that have proliferated as a lucrative market in the sector has been opened up
SNIP-
But what matters more than all the statistics is the rationale underlying the shift from social welfare to a toughening in penal policy. Far from being inconsistent with the neoliberal programme of deregulation and decline of the public sector, the rise in prominence of the US penal system reveals the true picture, reflecting a policy of criminalising poverty which inevitably goes hand-in-hand with the imposition of insecure and underpaid jobs, as well as the restructuring of social welfare programmes to make them more restrictive and punitive.
FROM WELFARE STATE TO PRISON STATE
Imprisoning the American poor
It should be noted that at the same time the statistics show an increase in incarcerated women, Ohio welfare roles were drastically declining (-60%).
Source: Department of Health and Human Services
Why? The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
also know as The Clinton Welfare Reform Act
Progressive Democrats predicted disaster.
As Senator Paul Wellstone predicted on the Senate floor:
"Over two-thirds of a million low-income persons lost Medicaid coverage and became uninsured due to welfare reform. Sixty-two percent were children. Moreover, the number of people who lose health coverage due to welfare reform is certain to grow rather substantially in the years ahead. In every state there is a drop-dead certain date when families are going to be eliminated from all assistance."
Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who did support Wellstone on the floor on May 25, told his colleagues that according to recent studies by the Children's Defense Fund and the National Coalition on the Homeless, "most former welfare recipients earn below-poverty wages and do not receive the essential services that would enable them to hold jobs and care for their children."
Nat Hentoff March 15 - 21, 2000
Kennedy, who voted against the bill, described it as "legislative child abuse."
Even Daniel Patrick Moynihan opposed their "welfare reform" law. When it was passed, Moynihan called it "the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction."
The purging of the welfare roles provided plenty of fresh meat for another corporate beast.
Earlier in 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Omnibus Crime Bill. This legislation implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund prison construction that mandatory sentencing would require.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population and the Privatization of the Federal Prison System.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
According to Catherine Austin Fitts,Assistant Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner during the first Bush Administration...
"This is how we have welfare reform, but tremendous opposition to learning centers and business incubation. We need the welfare population to go to jail and the children of farmers to guard them. The welfare population provides a low cost work force and distribution locations for the drug business. Then they are put in prison and produce the necessary headlines to prove that politicians are doing something about drugs."
Prison privatization is now a galloping industry that has the support of everyone from Bill Clinton to the Republican right. Some of the country's biggest corporations are investing in the business, including American Express and Goldman Sachs & Co. Stock in CCA has quadrupled in the past four years. And these companies wield growing political clout.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C.
From 1995 to 2000, three companies (CCA, Wackenhut and Cornell ) made a total of more than $528,000 in federal campaign contributions -- much of it in "soft money" given to the political parties,
Oh, It's a profit deal...
..."the reason why we're so excited about the federal side, Federal officials cut you that check every month," whether or not the cells are full.
...the Bureau of Prisons guaranteed CCA a 95% occupancy rate --
... Of the five private prisons now operating under contract with the Bureau of Prisons, three belong to CCA and two to Wackenhut Corrections Corp., the industry's No. 2 player, which has had its own financial problems. All of the contracts are generous by conventional industry standards, as they include occupancy guarantees and long-term renewal options.
WSJ
The Welfare Reform of the Clinton Administration was a time bomb. The fuse was lit in 1996 and now we are seeing an explosion in the number of women that have been impoverished and incarcerated in Ohio and other states.
The bill was vetoed by President Bill Clinton twice but was finally signed into law. 3 administration officials resigned immediately, including Peter Edelman, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr Edelman said the the Clintons ignored a study that showed, the bill would move 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty.
Edelman's wife, Marian Wright Edelman, founder and head of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund and the woman Hillary Clinton often mentions as her mentor, was asked by Amy Goodman in July 2007;
AMY GOODMAN: ... when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, "His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children." So what are your hopes right now for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham Clinton?
MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. We have to build a constituency, and you don’t—and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need health care, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.
Mrs. Edelman is referring to the fact that HRC supported the 3rd version of the bill.
Do The Math:
If the welfare rolls decrease, so too should the unemployment rate.
In 1997, Ohio's unemployment rate was as low as 4.1
In 2002 (after the 5 year and out effect of welfare reform), unemployment rates ranged from 5.4 to 5.9.
It got worse, in 2004-2005, it soared as high as 6.9
U.S. Department of Labor
Bureau of Labor Statistics
But the welfare rolls went down 60% during the same period;
Welfare rolls slashed across the U.S.
Aug. 1996 Ohio welfare families 204,240
Dec. 2005 Ohio welfare families 81,425 -60.1%
Source: Department of Health and Human Services
And the women's prison population was going up:
Number of women prisoners climbs in Ohio, bucking downward trend among men
Between 1999 and 2004 the Ohio's male prison population fell by 5.4 percent while the number of women behind state prison bars shot up by 12 percent. The growth in Ohio's female prison population should be cause for particular concern because of the unique strains on children or families that can result from the incarceration of mothers.
...other states
Source: Justice Strategies
The (so called) "War On Drugs"
Women arrested for involvement in the drug trade tend to play peripheral or minimal roles. Some are just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man.
According to the ACLU,
This little known side effect is often called the "girlfriend problem" - the propensity of arrest and prosecution of low-level, minimally or unknowingly involved individuals for crimes associated with drug trafficking operations.
Panelists in today's briefing said that without meaningful information to trade with prosecutors for more lenient sentences, these minimally involved girlfriends and wives often suffer some of the longest and harshest prison sentences under current drug sentencing laws.
Jesselyn McCurdy, an ACLU Legislative Counsel
.
The vast majority of women’s arrests are for lower-level offenses, with 82 percent of women’s arrests falling into the less serious "non-index" category.
This includes a large number of arrests for drug violations, as well as minor offenses typically thought to be "women’s crimes," such as shoplifting and welfare fraud.
Source:The Institute on Women and Criminal Justice of the Women’s Prison Assoc.
Review:
Clinton's Crime Bill budgeted $10.5 billion to fund new prison construction.
Clinton's Crime Bill strengthened Mandatory Minimums.
Clinton's War on Drugs aggressively prosecuted women.
Clinton's Welfare Reform sent millions of people into poverty
Clinton's Bureau of Federal Prisons guaranteed Private Prisons 95% occupancy rate.
Welfare recipients declined. Ohio: -60%
Unemployment increased. 4.1 to 6.9
Ohio' women's prison population increased by 12%, Men decline -5.4%
Is this any way to run a Democracy?
Two For The Price of One Presidency
Hillary Clinton Embraces Her Husband's Legacy
Both Clintons are making the case that theirs was a co-presidency -- an echo of Bill Clinton's controversial statement during the 1992 campaign that voters would get "two for the price of one" if they elected him.
Washington Post
By Anne E. Kornblut and Alec MacGillis
Saturday, December 22, 2007; Page A01
Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. The price is too high.
The number of women incarcerated in prisons and jails in the USA is approximately 10 times more than the number of women incarcerated in Western European countries, even though Western Europe's combined female population is about the same size as that of the USA.
Source: Amnesty International, "Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody" (Washington, DC: Amnesty International, March 1999), p. 15.