Is this Chief Justice Leo Strines Earl Warren moment? You may recall that California Governor Earl Warren spearheaded the move to intern Japanese-American citizens during WW2, leading him to be considered a sound conservative when appointed Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court ... where he then led the court to Brown v Board of Education of Topeka KS, ending school segregation. Now Strine, who spent last year unapologetically supporting Delawares secret corporate court system, even in the wake of Federal rulings against them, has sounded the charge to deal with Delawares racially imbalanced, poverty-driven conviction and incarceration rates: We are at a very disturbing time in our states history, Strine said. And while I applaud his candor in talking about bail bond rates, and racially disparate prison populations, there are some cautions to be observed before jumping onto this particular bandwagon with him. First, he needs to acknowledge the high proportion of Delawares inmate population that results from victimless drug possession crimes ... about 2,300 per year, by far mostly African-American (because the parents of white teens can usually afford the attorneys to get them probation). If we want to make an immediate dent in both crime and prison populations, then legalization of Marijuana and the treatment of addiction as a medical condition, not a criminal offense needs to be on the table whether Matt Denn or Delaware law enforcement likes it or not. Second, we need to watch carefully Strines impulse toward greater centralization of State authority: We are living with the vestiges of two things, he said, noting that Americas second smallest state is failing because it has a huge number of school districts and huge numbers of police forces. All are the products of our tortured history. I will leave it to my other education friends to weigh in on the idea that consolidated school districts are any more an educational panacea than high-stakes testing. As for consolidated police forces, it is important to note that Delaware STILL lacks any vestiges of real civilian control over law enforcement, and that our law enforcement agencies are spending unaccountable millions on the surveillance of law-abiding citizens. Until Strine, or Denn, or SOMEBODY answers the question, Who watches the Watchers? we need to regard the impulse toward further centralizing State authority with extreme suspicion. There are multiple, consistently recurring abuses of law enforcement authority in Delaware that I and others have documented, abuses that the Attorney General, the Secretary, and the Chief Justice are all unwilling to touch for fear of taking on the law enforcement lobby that has a literal stranglehold on our General Assembly. Strine may well be on the right track, but so far hes not showing any sign of being a reincarnation of Earl Warren. Desegregation dramatically changed America because it was a radical departure (fully supportable in Constitutional terms) from what had gone before. Strine is still using Delawares favorite stalling tactic (a task force to build Consensus among stakeholders, none of whom will actually be poor African-Americans) to nibble around the edges. delawareonline/story/news/crime/2015/01/19/chief-justice-mass-incarceration-make-us-safer/22001803/
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:27:26 +0000