With protests over the shooting of Amadou Diallo as a
backdrop, Columbia University's 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.
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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.
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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.
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In addition, community workshops sponsored by Riverside
Church were held simultaneously during the conference.
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The opening panel at 10 A.M., titled "Human Rights
Violations and the Prison System," 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.
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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: "Race-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."
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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 "New York State of Mind: Higher Education
versus Prison Funding in the Empire State."
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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, SUNY's 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.
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Proceedings of the April 23 conference will be published in
the January, 2000 issue of Souls.
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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, "In Defense of Mumia: The Political Economy of
Race, Class, Gender, and Social Death" 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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