Contact: Suzanne Trimel For immediate release

(212) 854-6579 April 15, 1999

smt4@columbia.edu

 

 

Columbia Hosts Conference April 23

On Racial Bias in Criminal Justice System

 

With protests over the shooting of Amadou Diallo as a backdrop, Columbia Universityâs Institute for Research on African-American Studies hosted a day-long conference on Friday, April 23, to examine racial bias and the U.S. criminal justice system.

The conference, which drew more than 500 people, examined police brutality, the influence of racial bias on criminal sentencing, the decreasing importance placed on rehabilitation in prisons, the political disenfranchisement of ex-felons, the incarceration of blacks for political activities during the civil rights and black power movements, the legitimacy of jury nullification as a means to insure just treatment in death penalty cases, and the rapid increase in the rate of imprisonment of black and Hispanic women.

Participants included leading scholars, activists and lawyers, including defense attorney Leonard Weinglass, who represents Mumia Abu-Jamal; Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree; Robert Gangi, Executive Director of The Correctional Association of New York; Eddie Ellis, Executive Director of the Community Justice Center of New York City; and Tonya McClary and George Kendall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In addition, community workshops sponsored by Riverside Church were held simultaneously during the conference.

The opening panel at 10 A.M., titled ãHuman Rights Violations and the Prison System,ä featured Iris Baez, whose son, Anthony, was killed by the New York City police; Linda Thurston of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Robert Gangi of the Correctional Association of New York and Law Professor David Greenberg.

Professor Manning Marable, the conference organizer and moderator who is Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia, believes the massive expansion of the prison system in the United States is a primary means of social and economic control and political repression of minorities. Marable, an historian, black activist, and editor of Souls, a progressive journal of black politics, culture and society, said: ãRace-ing justice -- by which we mean the central role that race plays at all levels of the criminal justice system -- is now experienced by millions of African-Americans, other racialized minorities and poor people. Our goal at this conference is to understand the increasingly destructive role of the police and the court system in denying justice and equality under the law to the majority of American working people and to present progressive alternatives to this destructive process.ä

Marable points to the findings of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison watchdog group, and the Justice Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., in a report titled ãNew York State of Mind: Higher Education versus Prison Funding in the Empire State.ä

The report disclosed:

*More African-Americans have been shipped to prison for drug crimes each year than have graduated from the State University of New York -- with undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees put together. While 4,054 African Americans received SUNY degrees in 1997, 4,727 African-Americans entered state prison on drug offenses.

*New York spends $275 million more to run prisons than state and city colleges.

*To help offset budget cuts, SUNYâs four-year colleges more than doubled their tuition between 1991 and 1996 -- from $1,350 to $3,400. At the same time, the amount of state money flowing the prison system annually has increased from $450 million to $1.7 billion over the last 15 years.

Proceedings of the April 23 conference will be published in the January, 2000 issue of Souls.

The conference, which includes an evening break at 5:45 P.M., will take place at Jerome Greene Hall, 435 West 116th Street at Amsterdam Avenue in Rooms 102 and 104. An evening session, ãIn Defense of Mumia: The Political Economy of Race, Class, Gender, and Social Deathä is scheduled at 7 P.M. Media coverage is welcome. Journalists are asked to call Suzanne Trimel in the Office of Public Affairs, (212) 854-6579, to make advance arrangements.

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