Month: July 2012

Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?: Yes

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in African American Psychology, Petty Tyrants, Racial Abuse

Yes.

It can be a delusional symptom of psychotic disorders

Alvin F Poussaint, Professor of psychiatry1

Author information ► Copyright and License information ►

The American Psychiatric Association has never officially recognized extreme racism (as opposed to ordinary prejudice) as a mental health problem, although the issue was raised more than 30 years ago. After several racist killings in the civil rights era, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have extreme bigotry classified as a mental disorder. The association’s officials rejected the recommendation, arguing that because so many Americans are racist, even extreme racism in this country is normative—a cultural problem rather than an indication of psychopathology.

The psychiatric profession’s primary index for diagnosing psychiatric symptoms, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), does not include racism, prejudice, or bigotry in its text or index.1 Therefore, there is currently no support for including extreme racism under any diagnostic category. This leads psychiatrists to think that it cannot and should not be treated in their patients.

To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy. Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness.

Extreme racists’ violence should be considered in the context of behavior described by Allport in The Nature of Prejudice.2 Allport’s 5-point scale categorizes increasingly dangerous acts. It begins with verbal expression of antagonism, progresses to avoidance of members of disliked groups, then to active discrimination against them, to physical attack, and finally to extermination (lynchings, massacres, genocide). That fifth point on the scale, the acting out of extermination fantasies, is readily classifiable as delusional behavior.

More recently, Sullaway and Dunbar used a prejudice rating scale to assess and describe levels of prejudice.3 They found associations between highly prejudiced people and other indicators of psychopathology. The subtype at the extreme end of their scale is a paranoid/delusional prejudice disorder.

Using the DSM’s structure of diagnostic criteria for delusional disorder,4(p329) I suggest the following subtype:

Prejudice type: A delusion whose theme is that a group of individuals, who share a defining characteristic, in one’s environment have a particular and unusual significance. These delusions are usually of a negative or pejorative nature, but also may be grandiose in content. When these delusions are extreme, the person may act out by attempting to harm, and even murder, members of the despised group(s).

Extreme racist delusions can also occur as a major symptom in other psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Persons suffering delusions usually have serious social dysfunction that impairs their ability to work with others and maintain employment.

As a clinical psychiatrist, I have treated several patients who projected their own unacceptable behavior and fears onto ethnic minorities, scapegoating them for society’s problems. Their strong racist feelings, which were tied to fixed belief systems impervious to reality checks, were symptoms of serious mental dysfunction. When these patients became more aware of their own problems, they grew less paranoid—and less prejudiced.

It is time for the American Psychiatric Association to designate extreme racism as a mental health problem by recognizing it as a delusional psychotic symptom. Persons afflicted with such psychopathology represent an immediate danger to themselves and others. Clinicians need guidelines for recognizing delusional racism in all its forms so that they can provide appropriate treatment. Otherwise, extreme delusional racists will continue to fall through the cracks of the mental health system, and we can expect more of them to explode and act out their deadly delusions.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Extreme racism indicates psychopathology

Go to:

Notes

Competing interests: None declared

Go to:

References

1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press; 2000.

2. Allport G. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; 1954.

3. Sullaway M, Dunbar E. Clinical manifestations of prejudice in psychotherapy: toward a strategy of assessment and treatment. Clin Psychol Sci Pract 1996;3: 296-309.

4. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic criteria for 297.1 delusional disorder. In: DSM-IV-TR: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press; 2000.

Articles from The Western Journal of Medicine are provided here courtesy of BMJ Group

Formats:

Full Text

|

PDF (201K)

You are here: NCBI > Literature > PubMed Central (PMC)

Write to the Help Desk

via Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?: Yes.

Researchers Puzzled by Rising Death Rates for African American Women in Childbirth – Inland Valley News

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Challenges and Wounds, Cultural Issues, Health Disparities

Researchers Puzzled by Rising Death Rates for African American Women in Childbirth

June 20, 2012 | Filed under: Health | Posted by: Admin

Community African American Women in Childbirth 300×224 Researchers Puzzled by Rising Death Rates for African American Women in Childbirth

By Marjorie Valbrun

Washington, DC–High rates of obesity, high blood pressure and inadequate prenatal care cause death from childbirth more often for African-Americans in the United States than for whites and other ethnic groups. Worsening this trend are the increasing numbers of cesarean sections nationally. These procedures can result in deadly complications for women dangerously overweight or suffering from hypertension or other ailments.

Nationally, blacks have a four-times greater risk of pregnancy-related death than whites—a rate of 36.1 per 100,000 live births compared with 9.6 for whites and 8.5 for Hispanics, according to a 2008 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Maternal mortality rates have been rising in the United States since the mid-1990s. In 1997, the black maternal mortality rate was 21.5 per 100,000 live births compared with 8.0 for Hispanics and 5.2 for whites, according to the CDC. The rate for other races was 8.8.

By 2007, the black maternal mortality rate had jumped to 28.4, roughly three times the rates among whites and Hispanics at 10.5 and 8.9 respectively. Statistics were not broken out for Asians/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans.

Trends show that black maternal mortality rates are increasing in some parts of the country, and two recent studies highlighting the problem have renewed calls for increased focus on reducing the deaths.

According to the new reports, the pregnancy-related mortality rate in some states rivals that in some developing nations. The problem is particularly acute in New York City, where blacks are nearly eight times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than whites, and in California where pregnant blacks are four times as likely to die from childbirth.

“The magnitude of this black-white gap in maternal mortality is the greatest among all health disparities . . . and that gap is growing. It’s unacceptable,” Michael Lu, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and public health at UCLA and an expert in racial and socio-economic disparities in maternal and infant health, recently told PBS NewsHour.

The black-white gap also stubbornly persists for a variety of socio-economic reasons, including education and income levels, access to and quality of health care, and lifestyle and diet. Improved health care could reduce the maternal death rate by 40 percent to 50 percent, according to CDC estimates, but medical attention has been focused more often on reducing infant mortality during the past decades.

“When we look at some of the factors associated with maternal mortality, most of the underlying factors tend to be dominant in the African-American community, and it is manifested in the health disparities that affect our population,” says Dr. Kerry M. Lewis, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Howard University’s College of Medicine and chief of the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

Lewis, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, says the mortality rate reflects lack of access to specialized health care that integrates comprehensive skills and technology. Too often, he says, patients are treated by family practitioners, nurse midwives, general obstetricians and gynecologists instead of specialists trained in high-risk pregnancies and medical problems that can cause complications during birth.

via Researchers Puzzled by Rising Death Rates for African American Women in Childbirth – Inland Valley News.

At the Dark End of the Street

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Books, Challenges and Wounds, Petty Tyrants, Racial Abuse, Writing our Stories
A young survivor of sexual violence at a women...
A young survivor of sexual violence at a women’s and girl’s centre. (Photo credit: Amnesty International)

Revealing Sex Crimes Against Black Women

 

By Jan Gardner

 Before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, she had already been fighting for racial equality for more than a decade. She strategized with other activists, organized protests, and in 1948 gave an impassioned speech that led to her election as secretary of the Alabama conference of the NAACP. In that position, she investigated cases of sexual violence and other crimes against blacks, as she had done for the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.

Her role in defending the rights of black women is eloquently chronicled in the 2010 book, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power” by Danielle L. McGuire, a history professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

In her meticulously researched book, McGuire maintains that in order to fully understand the civil rights movement one must understand the history of sex crimes against black women and how these attacks were used as a weapon against the fight for racial equality. Being able to sit at a lunch counter or vote didn’t mean anything if black women couldn’t walk down the street or ride the bus unmolested.

As McGuire writes, “Between 1940 and 1975, sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy. … If we understand the role rape and sexual violence played in African Americans’ daily lives and within the larger freedom struggle, we have to reinterpret, if not rewrite, the history of the civil rights movement.”

Black Fathers Provide Their Families, Communities Much More than Money | Black Star Journal

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in African American Psychology, Challenges and Wounds, Writing our Stories

Black Fathers Provide Their Families, Communities Much More than Money

June 18, 2012

By Editor

Fb-Button

June 13, 2012

At Atlanta Black Star, we are spending this entire week celebrating, honoring, exploring and uplifting Black Fatherhood by examining it through the lens of 7 themes: Lead, Build, Provide, Care, Protect, Work and Love. This is the third story in the series, looking at all the ways—often beyond money—that black fathers uplift their families by being providers.

Cover Photo

Black men are more than providers of food, clothing and shelter for their families. They have, for decades, been role models for their immediate families and the black community in general. What they often provide is a vision of strength, perseverance and pride.

On the fireplace mantle in the home of Mary Miller sits the picture of Andrew Jackson. Not the seventh President of the United States, but grandfather to the Miller children, Mary, Ron, Shirley and Beverly. Grandpa Jackson’s picture is the largest picture on the mantle, and appropriately so. A small man of stature, he was larger than life. He was a teacher, preacher, single parent, and inventor of two patented items: eyeglasses for cockfights, and a device to keep tractors in a straight line for plowing fields. Born in the 19th Century, some years after the emancipation, Grandpa Jackson was a stern disciplinarian who gave and demanded respect. He lived proudly and fearlessly in the Jim Crow south—emphasis on living fearlessly and Jim Crow south. Grandpa Jackson was the grandfather of my husband, Ron Miller.

The stories that stood out about Grandpa Jackson were not his inventions, per se, but how he lived and how he was an example for the community. It was not uncommon for Grandpa Jackson to direct white delivery and service people to the back door to mirror blacks who were forced to do the same in his lifetime. Grandpa Jackson was a “helluva” man.

Like Grandpa Jackson, there are thousands of stories of good black men that recycle through the black community. Only a few make it to mainstream, but not nearly enough to break the misperceptions and stereotypes.

Ever heard of Phil Jackson? No, not the Lakers coach, but the head of The Black Star Project. He founded the Chicago-based organization in 1996, and has since been relentless about eliminating the academic achievement gap between white students and black and Latino students locally and nationally.

What about Tim King, founder and CEO of Urban Prep Academies, a non-profit organization operating a network of public college-prep boys’ schools in Chicago—most of them predominantly African American—including the nation’s first all male charter high school

via Black Fathers Provide Their Families, Communities Much More than Money | Black Star Journal.

1 Church, 1 Job, 1 Young Black Man Working | Black Star Journal

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Social Justice

1 Church, 1 Job, 1 Young Black Man Working

July 3, 2012

By Editor

Fb-Button

The Black Star Project Presents…

The 1 CHURCH, 1 JOB, 1 Young Black Man Working Program

In times of economic strain, our whole community suffers from the complications of unemployment. In an effort to develop a new model of community outreach and economic sustainability, The Black«Star Project will soon launch the 1 Church, 1 Job program. It is estimated that inChicago alone there are approximately 10,000 churches. The Black«Star Project will offer the opportunity to participate in this program to as many churches as are willing. During this five-week program, young, jobless African Americans participating will receive a salary of $1000, job training and administrative mentoring throughout, and valuable work experience to draw from in the future.

By the end of the five-week program, all those who participate will gain something valuable. The workers, in addition to the five weeks of steady salary, will develop the skills and knowledge they need to pursue lasting employment. The churches will strengthen their community by keeping young people away from extra-legal forms of income, violence, and joblessness. Businesses will gain cheaper labor, informed workers, and federal recognition. Finally, those governmental bodies offering their support will help combat the problems they’ve been appointed to solve.

via 1 Church, 1 Job, 1 Young Black Man Working | Black Star Journal.

Racism in Schools: Unintentional But No Less Damaging

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in African American Psychology, Cultural Issues, Ethnic Identity

Racism in Schools: Unintentional But No Less Damaging.

Alejandra is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who speak little English and hold down jobs cleaning houses and working in a hotel. Last year, she graduated from a high school in Santa Barbara, Calif., where the student population is roughly half poor Latino and half affluent white.

Their worlds rarely intersect, with most white students taking high-level courses and most Latinos enrolled in the general-ed classes. But during her high school years, Alejandra was the exception.

She was the only Latino student with immigrant parents enrolled in a college-level program known as International Baccalaureate studies. Many of the fellow students came from the Santa Barbara County community of Montecito, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the nation (Oprah Winfrey has a home there). It was often an uncomfortable experience.

Alejandra finished high school with a 3.3 GPA — no small feat given her background and the rigorous program from which she graduated.

Nonetheless, when it came time to talk to her guidance counselor about future plans, the counselor dissuaded Alejandra from pursuing her dream to attend a four-year university. The counselor instead advised her to go to the local community college. Alejandra complied, and today is a student at Santa Barbara City College.

The experience, she said, filled her with self-doubt.

“I thought, maybe I’m not as good as I think I am,” she told Miller-McCune.com.

Battling Subtle Messages
Though racism in the public education system no longer takes the overt form of segregated schools, white students spitting on black students with impunity or National Guardsmen with rifles blocking the entrance to a school, several nonprofit organizations around the country focusing on racial justice in public schools say it’s still ubiquitous.

Although the counselor no doubt had Alejandra’s best interests in mind, the decision to steer her away from a four-year university was a classic example of unintentional racism, said Jarrod Schwartz, executive director of Just Communities Central Coast, a nonprofit based in Santa Barbara and dedicated to dismantling institutional racism in schools. (The group was founded in 2001 as The National Conference for Community and Justice of California’s Central Coast, which in turn had its roots in the venerable National Conference of Christians and Jews.)

“Most of the racism in schools today is not born out of intense hate and does not come from this place of wanting the worst for students of color,” he said. “It’s subtle.”

The organization spends much of its time informing educators about the everyday red flags that may be invisible to them, but glaringly obvious to many minority students and teachers of color.

A well-meaning high school counselor, for instance, may learn the names of all her white students, but barely any of her Latino pupils. A white teacher may call on students of color only for the easy questions. A teacher may embarrass a student of Korean descent by assuming the student knows how to pronounce a word in Vietnamese.

In May 2000, on the 40th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark case that ruled segregated schools unconstitutional — the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the state of California that brought the essence of institutionalized racism into sharp focus. Filed on behalf of 100 students in San Francisco, the case was named after Eliezer Williams, then a seventh-grader at Luther Burbank Middle School in San Francisco.

At Williams’ school, the textbooks were so scarce, students could not take them home; they were so old they still did not recognize the collapse of the Soviet Union. At certain times during the school day, there were no bathrooms; attorneys said students had urinated or defecated on themselves for lack of a restroom. The school was infested with vermin.

The suit argued that the state was failing to provide thousands of California students with the basic necessities for a decent education. Most of the students in question were poor minorities. In 2004, the case was settled, with the state setting aside $138 million for improving the textbooks and facilities of underserved student populations across California.

In a paper, Terry Keleher and Tammy Johnson of the Applied Research Center — a racial justice think tank — argued that the Williams case shows that institutionalized racism is alive and well in the 21st century.

“Institutional racism is frequently subtle, unintentional and invisible, but always potent,” they wrote. “Often, institutional racism involves complex and cumulative factors; for example, when many students of color, year after year, do not have access to fully credentialed teachers, high-quality curriculum materials and advanced courses.”  (see rest of article at above link)

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in African American Psychology

there is no doubt that much of the difference between African Americans and others in this society in regards to health disparities is due to white supremacy and its choking fog of racism……

Innerstanding Isness's avatarInnerstanding Isness

After decades of research, Arline Geronimus concludes that the long-term stress of living in a white-dominated society ‘weathers’ blacks, making them age faster than their white counterparts.

After decades of research, Arline Geronimus concludes that the long-term stress of living in a white-dominated society ‘weathers’ blacks, making them age faster than their white counterparts.

In the fall of 1976, Arline Geronimus began living in two separate, unequal worlds. At Princeton University, the political theory major became a research assistant to Charles Westoff, a professor who studied teen pregnancy among the urban poor. Down the road at Planned Parenthood in Trenton, N.J., she spent time with real-life, impoverished pregnant teens.

A self-assured, middle-class Jewish girl from Brookline, Mass., Geronimus shuttled between the extremes of haves and have-nots, eventually spotting a chasm between the theories of Princeton researchers and the experiences of the women she taught.

Geronimus would sit in on…

View original post 5,215 more words

African American Literature – Author Profiles, Book ; Film Reviews, Interviews and More

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Books, Important Websites, Writing our Stories

African American Literature Book Club

Alliance for Black Literature and Entertainment


African American Literature – Author Profiles, Book & Film Reviews, Interviews and More.

Related articles

Daily Kos: Slippin’ into whiteness: Melungeons and other ‘almost white’ groups

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in African American Psychology, Ethnic Identity, Writing our Stories

Daily Kos: Slippin’ into whiteness: Melungeons and other ‘almost white’ groups.SUN JUL 01, 2012 AT 01:00 PM PDT
Slippin’ into whiteness: Melungeons and other ‘almost white’ groups
byDenise Oliver VelezFollowforDaily Kos
Share109
PERMALINK    317 COMMENTS

Arch Goins and family,
Melungeons from Graysville, Tennessee
“Whiteness” in the U.S. has value. It is no surprise that in a society that has historically oppressed, scorned and demonized “blackness” (as if blacks were almost an untouchable caste), some sub-cultural groups scattered across the nation sought refuge in elaborately constructed “not black” clusters. The United States government, mandated by the Constitution to collect census data that included “race” as a category, created much of the confusion, with shifting classifications over time, using terms like mulatto, octoroon, mestizo, and mixed. Some states also classified those people who were “not white” and not enslaved simply as “free people of color,” which at times included Mexicans and Native Americans.

Clusters of people who were designated “not black,” but historically “not white,” were scattered across the U.S. All of these groups, dubbed by anthropologists and sociologists as “tri-racial isolates,” or “maroons,” are an interesting part of our troubled racialized history and current notions of “race,” “ethnicity,” ancestry, and genetics.

One maroon group that has fascinated both social scientists and genealogists were named by outsiders (as a slur) and they now dub themselves with the same name: Melungeon. Their history and self-constructed folk mythology has been re-visited in recent years due to the advent of modern DNA research.

I first encountered their stories when I came across a book called Almost White by Brewton Berry (1963, McMillan), when I was beginning to explore some of my own family history. Berry described maroon communities, which I pursued an interest in researching, who were given pejorative names like Jackson Whites, Pooles, Brass Ankles, Redbones, Gouldtowners, and Melungeons.

Some like the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina have forcefully rejected “othering” and “whiteness,” and though many tribe members have visible African ancestry, they have fought for their identity as Native Americans.

There are now numerous websites dedicated to the exploration of “race,” racialism, “mixed race” identity, and genetics—the most popular is historian Frank Sweet’s Backintyme site. Sweet has also authored a series of computer animations for YouTube on “the study of racialism,” which explores the data from his site.

(More on the link above)

Books

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Books, Writing our Stories
Folio Society book collection
Folio Society book collection (Photo credit: warwick_carter)

Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile | Books | The Guardian.

I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer’s voice gets inside a reader’s head. I was perhaps lucky that for the first 10 years of my life there was no competition from television; and when one finally arrived in the household, it was under the strict control of my parents. They were both schoolteachers, so respect for the book and what it contained were implicit. We didn’t go to church, but we did go to the library.

My maternal grandparents were also teachers. Grandpa had a mail-order set of Dickens and a Nelson’s Cyclopaedia in about 30 small red volumes. My parents had classier and more varied books, and in later life became members of the Folio Society. I grew up assuming that all homes contained books; that this was normal. It was normal, too, that they were valued for their usefulness: to learn from at school, to dispense and verify information, and to entertain during the holidays. My father had collections of Times Fourth Leaders; my mother might enjoy a Nancy Mitford. Their shelves also contained the leather-bound prizes my father had won at Ilkeston County School between 1921 and 1925, for “General Proficiency” or “General Excellence”: The Pageant of English Prose, Goldsmith’s Poetical Works, Cary’s Dante, Lytton’s Last of the Barons, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth.

None of these works excited me as a boy. I first started investigating my parents’ shelves (and those of my grandparents, and of my older brother) when awareness of sex dawned. Grandpa’s library contained little lubricity except a scene or two in John Masters’s Bhowani Junction; my parents had William Orpen’s History of Art with several important black-and-white illustrations; but my brother owned a copy of Petronius’s Satyricon, which was the hottest book by far on the home shelves. The Romans definitely led a more riotous life than the one I witnessed around me in Northwood, Middlesex. Banquets, slave girls, orgies, all sorts of stuff. I wonder if my brother noticed that after a while some of the pages of his Satyricon were almost falling from the spine. Foolishly, I assumed all his ancient classics must have similar erotic content. I spent many a dull day with his Hesiod before concluding that this wasn’t the case.

The local high street included an establishment we referred to as “the bookshop”. In fact, it was a fancy-goods store plus stationer’s with a downstairs room, about half of which was given over to books. Some of them were quite respectable – Penguin classics, Penguin and Pan fiction. Part of me assumed that these were all the books that there were. I mean, I knew there were different books in the public library, and there were school books, which were again different; but in terms of the wider world of books, I assumed this tiny sample was somehow representative. Occasionally, in another suburb or town, we might visit a “real” bookshop, which usually turned out to be a branch of WH Smith.

(see above link for rest  of post)

Related articles

Louisiana’s Incarceration Rate

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Petty Tyrants, Racial Abuse, Social Justice

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is the highest in US and it get much worse. As Charles M. Blow details. New York Times: Plantations, Prisons and Profits.

——————————————————————————–

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.

• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.

In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did.

It also was a chance to employ local people, especially failed farmers forced into bankruptcy court by a severe drop in the crop prices.

But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities.

——————————————————————————–

The eight part series from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans on this abomination. The Times-Picayune: LOUISIANA INCARCERATED.

——————————————————————————–

via Daily Kos: Black Kos, Tuesday’s Chile.

Slave Narratives: Voices and Faces from the Collection, p6 – StumbleUpon

by vanessa mahmoud, posted in Narratives of the Enslaved

Slave Narratives: Voices and Faces from the Collection, p6 – StumbleUpon.