MeloPolitical

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How Does this End?

America is about to start yet ANOTHER war in the Middle East. They say it’s to stop terrorism, but we’ve heard that before. We’ve been invading, bombing, cruise missiling, and droning countries for decades, and terrorism hasn’t gone away. Congress and the President need to stop and think - how does this end?

The simple answer is that it doesn’t. President Bush’s so-called War on Terror seems likely to continue to the end of President Obama’s term and beyond. America no longer ends the wars it starts, whether literal wars or figurative ones. There’s too much money at stake. Whether it’s Halliburton selling supplies, or Lockheed Martin’s over-budget, dysfunctional F-35, those who make money off foreign wars are not content to just let them end.

Perpetual war doesn’t make the world safer. It breeds extremism and terrorism abroad, while costing trillions of dollars back home. But, it also puts the American psyche permanently on a wartime footing. So it’s not surprising that we’re arming our police for war, even when they’re facing peaceful protests. It’s no wonder that another famous “war”, the so-called War on Drugs keeps raging in the face of all the evidence that it is not working.

Arming “moderate” groups, while bombing “extremist” groups hasn’t working out well for us either, but that’s not stopping the House of Representatives from endorsing President Obama’s plan to do just that.

No one is saying that ISIS or Al Qaeda or any other extremist organizations are a bunch of nice guys, or that they wouldn’t deserve all the terrible things the US military could do to them. The problem is that we’ve been kicking terrorist ass over the world, but in doing so, we’re not pausing for a moment to consider the unintended consequences.

In the 1980s, we decided that the enemy of our enemy, the Soviet Union, would make great friends. We handed off hundreds of millions of dollars to arm and train the Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan. We did not fully understand who these fighters were, nor did we fully appreciate or seemed to care about the radical social policies they would enact if they won, so long as they could be a pain in the side of the “evil empire.”

The problem was that those same fighters included Osama Bin Laden, and future members of the Taliban. They famously attacked the American homeland in 2001, but were also implicated in several preceding attacks all over the world. This lead to our own invasion of Afghanistan, where we’re still fighting rebel elements as well as launching attacks into neighboring Pakistan. Our policy of drone strikes in the region are undoubtedly creating new terrorists. Victims of drone strikes are often innocent children, not bad guys, and you can hardly blame them for hating America when the first time they heard about our country was because their neighbor’s house has been destroyed by our military.

That whole litany of killing and more killing can be traced to previous leaders’ reluctance to consider the results of their actions. Now, the President and Congress are planning to do the same thing in Syria and Iraq. This time, do you think our military action and the arming of militants will have a different outcome? How does this end?

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Our newest video screened at LA City Hall

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To Prison for Poverty

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Threatened with Jail for Being Poor

To Prison for Poverty

Many people think that debtor’s prisons disappeared from American society just as surely as horse-based transportation. But in fact, people who are too poor to pay fines are still being threatened with incarceration today, but with an all too familiar twist: private companies are making money off people who can’t pay.

Our new documentary, To Prison For Poverty, features two parts. Part 1 tells the story of Hali Wood, a seventeen-year-old from Columbiana, Alabama, deeply in debt to a private probation company, JCS.  Part 2 tells the story of Kathleen Hucks, a woman suing Sentinel Corrections Services for their abuse of power.

We’ve long known that issues of mass incarceration disproportionately affect poor people. In our video about the money bail system, we found that the wealthier a person is when arrested, the less he or she will pay in terms of money and freedom. A rich person can pay bail right away and go home, receiving his or her money back upon returning to court. A poor person accused of the same thing must pay fees to a bail bondsmen to secure freedom, but that fee is never refunded. That means that a teacher might pay $40,000 in bail fines, when a movie star charged with the same offense would pay nothing.

We see a similar dynamic with private probation companies.  If someone gets a traffic ticket and can’t pay, the judge puts them on “probation”, which really means walking down the hall and signing up for a payment plan with a private probation company who has a contract with the court. If they can’t pay, they go to jail. (Which is somehow supposed to make paying the ticket easier for someone who can’t afford it in the first place.)

Like payday lenders, these for-profit companies seek out neighborhoods where they know the population will, on average, have a tougher time paying traffic tickets out right. Then they charge exorbitant fees. Hali Wood was hit with a $41 seat belt ticket. Her payment plan charged a monthly fee of $35.  That’s 85% interest!

This is unlike any other probation programs we’ve run across in almost two years of producing documentaries about the criminal justice system. Probation is supposed to help people avoid jail or prison. These companies are simply collections agencies on steroids.

Judges who run these courts can end this tomorrow, either by exerting more oversight of these companies, or by simply ending contracts with them. As we explore in our documentary, traditional public probation does a fine job of enforcing the law without a profit motive.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be screening To Prison for Poverty in the very communities where these companies operate. JCS and Sentinel cannot be allowed to continue preying on people who can’t pay.

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A scene from To Prison For Poverty, May 2014.

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His Purple Heart "Didn't Mean Shit."

How often have we heard of employees being injured on the job and their bosses trying to squirm out of paying for benefits? We’ve seen it with coal miners and NFL Players, but what if the job was defending our country, and the boss was the US military?

That's what happened to Marine Corps veteran Josh Christmon, the subject of the Brave New Films' newest video, Bad Paper. Josh earned a Purple Heart from his service in Iraq, where a close encounter with a roadside explosion nearly killed him. He suffered back problems and leg injuries, but maybe worse than all that were the nightmares, the depression, and the disconnection from his family - classic signs of PTSD.

Josh's bad dreams followed him back home. Alcohol seemed as good a way to forget as anything, so one night, he went out for drinks. He was also offered a joint. Josh took two puffs. A week later, he failed a random drug test at work. Days after that, he was less than honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, losing all of his veterans benefits, including his medical care.

This kind of zero tolerance policy has invaded every corner of American society. We see it in our schools, where kids are arrested, behavior that used to send them to the principal's office.  We see it in our harsh response to our nation’s broken immigration system,labeling those that seek jobs and opportunities as hardened criminals. The worst of all zero tolerance policies - our nation’s long running War on Drugs - hasn’t made a dent in our drug addiction rates, but has sent our incarceration rates soaring past every other nation on Earth.

We’re so interested in the most severe penalties that we are blind to context. In this case, zero tolerance threw away a brave Marine. As Josh puts it in the video, his "purple heart didn't mean shit".

 When you hear his story, you can’t help but wonder if the military is looking for any excuse to withhold benefits. After all, marijuana use may be illegal, but it’s also probably a good treatment for PTSD. And you’d think the military would have a vested interest in treating the disorder by any means necessary, considering its possibly deadly effects on veterans and on others.

Like Vietnam veterans before him, Josh is being denied care for PTSD because he was kicked out of the military for behavior stemming from his PTSD. When you place Josh’s story against the backdrop of a military industrial complex intent on spending billions of dollars on an F-35 that doesn’t work and on contractors who have often ripped them off in the past, the situation seems even more egregious. 

Fortunately for Josh and other veterans, there are organizations like Swords to Plowshares that are fighting to restore their lost benefits. But it shouldn’t be this way in the first place. A one size fits all policy that doesn’t take into consideration what a veteran has sacrificed is simply unfair.

Congress can stop this madness by using its oversight power to change the way the military handles its discharges.

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Why are brave men and women being denied benefits after risking their lives for our country? Check out the trailer for our upcoming short doc, Bad Paper.

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You Punish a Child When You Lock Up Her Mom

Most Americans take for granted the idea that they will succeed more than their parents did. But recently many studies have shown that Americans are not as socially mobile as their European counterparts. Nowhere are the consequences of that immobility so stark than in the criminal justice system.

Our newest short documentary, Vanessa’s Eight Year Sentence, follows a Bay Area teen with an incarcerated parent who is on the precarious edge of the system herself. When they took her mom away, Vanessa stopped caring. She acted out in school, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in a group home. By the time we met her, her mom only had a year left in her sentence, but Vanessa was one small mistake away from violating her probation and ending up in juvenile hall. Imagine the mother walking out of the walls of prison, only to see her child step in.

This cycle is one of the ways that incarceration becomes mass incarceration, where prison terms seem to be inherited from one generation to the next. Many of our documentaries have taught us that people caught up in the system have often been exposed to it early on, whether you run away from home in Oregon, or you follow your father’s path of addiction and incarceration in the Bronx.

There is way more to the story than "do the crime, do the time". Vanessa's mom was convicted of selling drugs and she had prior arrests. Having kids doesn’t grant you clemency in the eyes of the law, but it does mean that when we design a punishment for the parent, we automatically punish the child. 

The latest numbers from the Feds tell us that we locked up 744,200 fathers and 65,600 mothers as of midyear 2007. We know that number has gone up and we know two-thirds of prisoners are in for non-violent offenses.

There are solutions. For Vanessa’s mom, there’s no reason that ankle monitoring, daily check-ins or other alternatives to incarceration could be used as punishment instead of her eight year long incarceration. Don’t take our word it, these are exactly the solutions proposed by Rick Van Wickler, the superintendent of a prison in New Hampshire.

As Vanessa’s story shows, our harsh punishments come back to haunt us. Vanessa was lucky enough to get involved with Project WHAT, a bay area program that raises awareness for children of parents in jail and prison, the same program that helped Jazree, the subject of the recently released Jazree’s Court.

Vanessa will hopefully make it, stay out of juvie and be able to reunite with her mother later this year. But what about all the kids who don’t make it? Children with incarcerated parents are five times more likely than their peers to end up behind the bars.

How much crime do we create by taking parents away?

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Mandatory Minimums lock up low levels offenders for way too long and for too much expense.

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It Only Costs $1.3 Million to Ruin a Young Man’s Life

Imagine you’re a judge. A 19-year-old young man named Ronald D. Evans comes before you. He has been convicted of selling drugs and your job is to sentence him fairly. If you’re like me, you’d be pretty skeptical that such a young man was a cigar-chomping, mansion-owning drug kingpin, who deserves an overly harsh penalty. But maybe you’d still conclude he deserves some prison time. Not a lot, but just enough so that the punishment fits the crime.

Sorry, Judge. You can’t actually do anything of those. Ronald was convicted of charges that require mandatory minimum sentences. That means you can’t decide how he’s punished, if at all. Lawmakers who have never met Ronald and who don’t know the specifics of his case have preordained it. 

For Ronald, a young, low-level, nonviolent, drug seller, you must sentence him to life in prison. Without parole. You must decide against all your better judgment that this young man deserves to be punished until he dies and that you will never, ever give him a chance to prove he’s changed.

There are no shortages of cases like these where harsh policies seemingly designed for the worst movie villains are applied to the young, the poor, and the powerless. We crack down on immigrants who entered the country looking to work the hardest jobs at the lowest pay. We crack down on our own kids when they act up in the school. Picking on people is the new national pastime, it seems. 

And an expensive hobby at that. For all 2.2 million prisoners in the United States, taxpayers are shelling out on average about $30,000 per person per year. ). Ronald D Evans’ sentence alone is expected to cost taxpayers at least $1.3 million. 

Last December, when President Obama announced the commutations of sentences of a handful of federal prisoners, we applauded the decision, despite the thousands left behind bars. We have now heard rumors that many more hundreds or even thousands of pardons may be on the way. We again applaud these efforts, but if lasting changes to the laws that support these penalties aren’t changed, the next Ronald D. Evans will be entirely at the mercy of the next president’s mood.

That’s why Brave New Films partnered with Families Against Mandatory Minimum and the American Civil Liberties Union to support the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bill currently working its way through the Senate. This act would reform how mandatory minimums would apply, and reduce the penalties. We need your help.

Please call your senator and tell him or her to pass the smarter sentencing act now.

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Our Prison System picks on Women, Children & Minorities

If you follow Brave New Films you already know that the United States locks up more people than any other country on Earth. And you know that the 40-year-old War on Drugs has done nothing to decrease drug addiction.

But did you know your race determines your chances of going to prison?  That the incarceration of women is on the rise?  Or that there’s a pipeline that sucks kids in from school and deposits them behind bars at alarming rates?

That’s why Brave New Films has just released a playlist of short motion graphics that challenges your assumptions about mass incarceration.

 Racial bias in our justice system is too obvious to ignore, and has repercussions far beyond a prison cell.  Because felony convictions can limit your options for jobs, housing and education once you’re released, high incarceration rates in a community lead to higher rates of homelessness and unemployment.  And often, those situations leave people with few options to support themselves, except the criminal activity that got them in trouble in the first place.  Children of incarcerated parents are more likely to get in trouble with the law, so people living within those communities face a self-perpetuating cycle. 

As will come as no surprise, poor communities are hit hardest by this cycle.  These are the same communities who suffer when well-funded one-percenters like the Koch Brothers seek to undermine efforts to raise the minimum wage or cut programs like food stamps or Head Start.  Some of these communities have large populations of immigrants who are imprisoned or deported for a profit, tearing their families apart.

Worse, as we learned in our interview with former DEA Agent Matt Fogg, it’s not an accident that law enforcement only seems to bust down doors in certain zip codes.  In fact, that selective enforcement of the War on Drugs reminds us of an earlier era when laws existed specifically to punish poor people of color.

Meanwhile, the kids in communities all across the country are also facing incarceration through the School to Prison pipeline. Kids who act out are being treated like hardened criminals, all supposedly in an effort to keep schools safe.  But we know that kids who face incarceration are more likely to become adults who commit crimes, which means that these zero tolerance policies actually undermine safety in the long term.

Most kids act out because kids just sometimes act out.  Those who chronically act out often have something going at home that needs addressing.  Instead of trying to get at the root of the problem, schools rush to suspend, expel or even arrest kids.  We know that counseling can help kids avoid bad behavior in the future, but we turn a blind eye anyway.

Those root causes can sometimes be abuse or neglect in the home. Women make up over 70% of victims of domestic violence, and exposure to that violence as a child can often be the beginning of a long relationship with the criminal justice system. 

Take the story of Tammy, whose abuse by her stepfather led her to run away from home at age 11, get involved in street prostitution, abuse drugs and spend decades in prison. By the time we shot the documentary profiling her story, Tammy had received help from community mentors, re-established a relationship with her son and was on her way to finish school.  She’s not a person you could ever picture in prison. Yet, the number of women in prison has surpassed 200,000 and keeps rising.

There all kinds of bad incentives to keep our correctional system the way it is, from making money to the belief that victims always seek revenge. But what we must do is face is the larger culture of retribution that is most to blame.  

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Produced by Brave New Films

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We punish a child when we lock up her dad.

The newest video from Brave New Films, Jazree's Court, shows us what happens to kids when we send their parents to prison for excessively long sentences.

Eight years ago, Jazree was like any other eight-year-old hanging out with friends and experiencing important milestones of her youth. She finished elementary school and started the emotional rollercoaster called puberty. She even started having crushes — crushes on girls. All of these experiences impacted Jazree’s future, but one experience overshadowed all others. Jazree’s dad was sentenced to seven years in prison for possession of an unloaded firearm by a felon.

Jazree says her and her dad had been like two peas in a pod, like twins. But her mom — that was different story. They don’t get along. In eighth grade, when Jazree came out, her mom broke down crying. She still can’t get used to Jazree being a lesbian.

Jazree is one of 2.7 million American kids growing up forcibly separated from an incarcerated parent, another terrible consequence of America’s system of mass incarceration. At Brave New Films, we’ve seen countless stories of unnecessary suffering caused by our country’s obsession with long prison sentences. Our producers’ work hard to find stories most people haven’t heard and put a face to this tough issue.

We found Jazree through the non-profit who has been working with her in the Bay Area Project WHAT (We’re Here And Talking) is a youth-led organization that raises awareness for these children of parents in jail and prison. With their help, we were able to find and interview Jazree and her family.

Our producer, Brittany Washington, talked on the phone with Jazree weeks before the shoot began last Thanksgiving. She took Brittany to the basketball court – her home away from home and the inspiration for the film’s title. She started to warm up. She told the camera how she was bullied in school because she had a crush on a female classmate. Her mom said she should have expected it, after she told her friends she was “different.” She couldn’t talk to her dad — he was “away.”

Every teenager wrestles with her own issues. But most are lucky enough to have parents there to help them and understand their problems. But not Jazree. Like millions of others, she was forced to deal with the grief that comes with a parent’s absence. In her case, it was compounded by the complications of coming out.

Brittany spent three intimate days with Jazree and her family, filming or just talking. Her camera was there when Jazree and her dad Gordon were reunited after his release, two years after they last saw each other in the prison visiting room.

Zoe Willmont of Project WHAT tells me that the filming has been one of the best experiences Jazree has ever had. But there are so many other kids out there just like her. The United States locks up more of its citizens than any other country on Earth, and nearly two-thirds of them committed non-violent offenses. Now, one out of twenty-eight children in America have an incarcerated parent. We wanted viewers to think about our system differently. Is it worth it to warehouse millions of parents away from their kids? Isn’t there a better way?

Her dad may always carry the label “criminal,” but her love for him serves as a reminder that the incarcerated are more than just the sum of their mistakes. To many kids like Jazree, they are family, and sometimes the one person they need the most.