Just Say NO to More Prison Violence

by Elizabeth S. Q. Goodman, third-year graduate student in Mathematics

This piece originally appeared on Elizabeth’s personal blog, nonviolentrage.

Warning: this article discusses incarceration and sexual assault. 

Please, if you can, vote NO on proposition 35, the CASE Act.  The California Coalition for Women Prisoners has a very informative short page about why. Basically, all it does is increase punishments for things that are already illegal, and massively broaden the definition of who can be jailed for anything related to sex work, as well as the definition of who must register as a life-long sex offender.

The problem is broader than the specifics of this bill. It’s not just that not all sex workers are victims. It’s not just that many of the people who do business with sex workers are landlords, roommates, and many other people–all defined as “pimps”, all to be criminalized under Prop 35. It’s not just that the threat of law means that people who could potentially help get the most serious victims out of the system–clients, other sex workers, people who run the system–will be less likely to do so.

Stop the New Jail

by Raphael  Sperry, Instructor (CEE 136: Green Architecture)

Did you know that San Mateo County is planning to build a new jail? Stanford has a significant portion of its campus in San Mateo County, so what the county government does with local revenue is a significant issue. But this is also a basic issue of criminal justice and fairness that effects our neighbors, from East Palo Alto up to the San Francisco line. By investing tens of millions of dollars in the jail, San Mateo County is turning its back on crime prevention and rehabilitative services in the community… there won’t be enough money to fund everything.

In my class, I teach how to minimize the environmental impacts of buildings. I’ve also been involved with organizing other architects to oppose the construction of jails and prisons for almost ten years. This is an interesting collision of those issues for me, since San Mateo is proposing to build one of the first LEED-certified jails in the country. My short take on that is: if you build the jail, you might reduce emissions 30% from a typical building baseline, but if you don’t build it at all, you avoid 100% of the emissions – and that’s without taking the community impact into account. If you’d like to learn more about this issue, please come to the workshop below.

John Morton: Stop the Deportations

by Sharada Jambulapati, ’12, Aracely Mondragon, ’13 + Holly Fetter, ’13

Today, John Morton is the keynote speaker at the Stanford Law School’s 2nd Annual Immigration Compliance Symposium. This man is the Director of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the government agency responsible for arresting, detaining, and deporting thousands of immigrants a year.

Since Obama took office, ICE has deported 1.2 million immigrants. That’s more than any other president, including George W. Bush. Imagine that the entire population of Bush’s current hometown, Dallas, Texas, was forcibly removed from this country. 1.2 million people, gone.

This isn’t an issue of abstract, criminal bodies crossing borders. This is about real lives being destroyed by bureaucrats like John Morton.

It’s about families being separated, children being left behind while their parents are sent back to their country of origin. In the first half of 2011, the federal government removed over 46,000 mothers and fathers of U.S.-citizen children.